Unable to use Captcha Trac 1.0.1

[shreerajkarulkar@…]

Captcha is enabled in Webadmin and I have tried all four options (including reCaptcha) but I do not see any captcha image when I go to open a new bug. In fact as I prepare this ticket I would have expected a Captcha enabled but don't see one. Does thins mean you get a lot of SPAM and my request here is not going to be seen? Am I expecting something wrong?

[Dirk Stöcker]

I added some sentences about how captcha works here: ​http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/SpamFilter#Captcha

Essentially you are not supposed to ever see captchas except you make spam submissions. To get it you need to trigger one of the important filters i.e. by using the word starting with "v" which sells such nice pills.

[anonymous]

It was my understanding that when Captcha is setup right everyone is prompted with a challenge but that does not seem to be the case when people try to submit a new bug on out website. Everyday we get a huge amount of SPAM generated tickets which have to be dealt with. We do maintain a BadContent page but SPAMers keep coming up with new stuff we have to update this daily and manually. Do you think people are actually coming to our site and adding these tickets manually? -S

[Dirk Stöcker]

Please read the whole page ​http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/SpamFilter, as it explains how to setup a successful spamfilter. Most essential is the finetuning of Bayes filter. Also I recommend to disable textual captchas - Spam robots usually bypass them simply. And activate Akisment.

The BadContent page is only a last resort, a good trained bayes filter works much better.

A realistic goal is something like 1 spam slipping through for 5000 to 10000 attempts (except for a new type spam wave, where in the beginning you have maybe 10-20 slip through, but that happens only 1 or 2 times a year).

[Dirk Stöcker]

P.S. Also adding Mollom is a good idea.