Quote Originally Posted by buff
Are we stuck with old versions of captcha, or do the new versions (the ones that supposedly look at mouse movements or something) also fooled?
The version built into vbulletin 4 is just using imagemagick or php-gd to convolute a random string of text. It wasn’t great in 2004, and completely doesn’t work anymore, not even a speedbump for modern bots.

Vb4 also supported “human verification questions”, but for them to be effective you’d have to generate dozens or hundreds of questions that are hard for bots to answer. It was doable in 2005-2006, but the humans here hated it if the questions were actually effective at filtering out contemporary bots, and a too small or too easy question pool made it easy for even relatively dumb bots to breeze past. Now with gpt-powered bots, completely dead approach.

Last vb4 option was recaptcha. But recaptcha went commercial, went AI training tool, and completely changed their api. I’d have to upgrade to vb6 to be compatible with any current recaptcha, and then stay on that treadmill.

Quote Originally Posted by boo
what's the breakdown in terms of time vs money? is this an issue that you can throw 200 bucks to solve the problem?
New droplet migration is a couple bucks and a couple hours at most. Mainly the time spent would be dumping out the database and loading it into a new mysql, and we’re like a gig of db and a couple hundred megs of other stuff. Probably more work getting certbot up and happy, lots of little administrivia, but … yeah, couple hours of work.

If php versions aren’t compatible, new license is $179, which is not really a meaningful amount of money to me. Bigger issue is porting over theme bits and customizations, like our image rotator banner and custom rep system rework, but also maybe nobody cares much about that anymore and I could just set fixed rep power values instead of having complicated scaling to try to balance it. I mostly just scratched together the current theme to try to have a little continuity with the previous forums back when I moved to vb4. So … yeah, still not sure, anywhere from a couple hours to a couple tens of hours to get it looking and working comfortably again, and a the usual risks of any major version move.

Basically, it’s not a huge deal either way, but just something I’ve gotta find the spoons for. It’s pretty similar to the work I am doing in my actual job, which just sucks the novelty out of the whole thing and makes it kinda a drag to do, you know?