All Captchas fail

[Benno]

Vielleicht sollte ich Lotto spielen.. Ich hab 'ne 100% Quote.


Freundliche Grüße,
Benno

[brandstetter]

Hello

I tried again. Now it worked for me too. I'm confused, because I did not change anything. I need to watch this. It might be a Problem with the Provider. Or it might be Timing problem (race condition or so). I will watch this and post a feedback.

Thanks

[brandstetter]

I did several tests and it randomly succeeded and failed. Timecheck is disabled on the captcha page. Is there something like an IP check that I cannot post too often from the same IP? I'm not aware of this. But if it were, this might be an explaination. Otherwise I've got the impression it is some kind of timing condition or race condition or so.

[brandstetter]

OK. I did several retries. It appears, as if it always succeeds once and fails when trying to post subsequent entries. This might be some kind of spam protection by preventing multiple posts from the same browser session. I was not aware, that phoca guest book has something like this.

When I use Internet Explorer I need to restart IE, in order to be able to post one more entry. So far so good. Interestingly Firefox appears to have some kind of memory. The first time I post with Firefox it seems to work. All subsequent trials fail. But restarting Firefox does not help either. I need to wait some time, then I can post again. Firefox seems to have some kind of session memory. Never heard of this!

Of couse such behaviour makes it difficult to evaluate the different kinds of captchas. The first captcha succeeds and all futher captchas fail - I never thought that I must use Internet Explorer and have to close the browser after each trial in order to test different kinds of captchas. So maybe that's the reason why I've got the impression, that all captchas fail

Can anyone confirm, that Phoca Guestbook has a function that prevents posting twice from the same browser session? I'd appreciate if anyone could confirm this behaviour.

Thanks a lot for your help (and your patience)...

[brandstetter]

It does not work . I just retried again and it failed again. And this time it failed on the first trial! With IE and with Firefox.
In this condition Phoca Guestbook is unusable for me. It is too unreliable. I've no idea what problem this is.

Any help or any idea is appreciated.

[brandstetter]

After some research I found, that the problem was related to smilies. Yes: smilies!

When setting up my new Joomla 3.x site I manually copied all entries from the old Joomla 2.5 installation to the new 3.x installation. Some of the copied entries contained smilies. Means: <img>-Tags like this:

Code: Select all

<img title="Smile" src="media/editors/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/emotions/img/smiley-smile.gif" alt="Smile" border="0" />

After deleting all smilies from all entries the problem has gone!

I can't explain, what smilies have to do with captchas. And I cannot explain, why this problem appears only randomly. I may speculate that the broken link somehow affects captchas. But I have no idea.

Anyway. I hope this information helps others to avoid this pitfall.
(And maybe somewhen some guru may explain why ...)

[Jan]

Hi, thank you very much for this information.

Jan