Extension:ConfirmEdit

The ConfirmEdit extension enables a simple text Captcha that will probably catch most bots. It was designed largely by Brion Vibber. The FancyCaptcha and reCAPTCHA addons create more complex image captchas.

Captchas are a way of combating automated edits, helping to ensure that wiki edits are being made by real humans rather than bots. This can be particularly useful for reducing the problem of wiki spam, but captchas reduce accessibility and cause inconvenience to human users. In addition, it will not completely spam-proof your wiki (nor will it protect it from human spammers). You may wish to use this in conjunction with other anti-spam features. Remember to clean up any spam which might slip through the net (keep an eye on your 'recent changes' page). Captcha's can also be used to foil automated login attempts that try to guess passwords.

The reCAPTCHA Plugin is based on ConfirmEdit, and works very similarly. The reCAPTCHA plugin provides an audio CAPTCHA, does not require any python libraries, and has a stronger visual CAPTCHA than ConfirmEdit.

ConfirmEdit Installation
The ConfirmEdit extension requires MediaWiki 1.11.0 or higher and PHP5; SVN revisions before 21970 are PHP4-compatible.


 * Download the latest snapshot and extract it
 * Create a folder in the extensions folder named ConfirmEdit
 * Upload the files to the extensions/ConfirmEdit/ folder
 * Edit LocalSettings.php in the root of your MediaWiki installation, and add the following line near the bottom:

require_once( "$IP/extensions/ConfirmEdit/ConfirmEdit.php" );

Note that ConfirmEdit is quite sensitive to version mismatch (see Discussion).

If you wish, customize the following settings in LocalSettings.php (after the require_once line):


 * $wgCaptchaTriggers,
 * $ceAllowConfirmedEmail, (Allow users who have confirmed their e-mail addresses to post URL links without being harassed by the captcha) and
 * $wgCaptchaWhitelist. (Specific IP addresses are not harrassed by the captcha)

Configuration
ConfirmEdit introduces a ['skipcaptcha'] to wgGroupPermissions. This is useful for groups that shouldn't see captchas ever.

Defaults from ConfirmEdit.php:

By default, because the $wgGroupPermissions is "true" for registered bots and sysops, bots and sysops are not affected by the next five captcha triggers, "edit, create, addurl, createaccount, badlogin".

There are five triggers that can generate a captcha and allow for different situations.


 * $wgCaptchaTriggers['edit'] = true; -- Would check on every edit
 * $wgCaptchaTriggers['create']	= true; -- Check on page creation.
 * $wgCaptchaTriggers['addurl'] = true;  -- Check on edits that add URLs
 * $wgCaptchaTriggers['createaccount'] = true; -- Check on account creation.
 * $wgCaptchaTriggers['badlogin'] = true; -- Check after a failed log-in attempt.

Default triggers from ConfirmEdit.php:

The triggers, create and addurl can be configured per namespace using the   setting. If there is no  for the current namespace, the normal

Then the captcha will not trigger when adding urls to a talk page, but you will need to solve a captcha any time you edit the project namespace, even if you aren't adding a link.

Requiring only unregistered users to enter a captcha for every edit can be accomplished by:


 * $wgGroupPermissions['user'        ]['skipcaptcha'] = true;
 * $wgCaptchaTriggers['edit']         = true;

FancyCaptcha addon
The FancyCaptcha addon extension requires MediaWiki 1.11.0 or higher and the ConfirmEdit extension. The Python Imaging Library must be installed to create the captcha images, but isn't needed after that.


 * 1) Download the files from Wikimedia SVN (latest FancyCaptcha.php, FancyCaptcha.i18n.php, FancyCaptcha.class.php and captcha.py). Note: your copy of ConfirmEdit might already have these files in it.
 * 2) Upload the files to the extensions/ConfirmEdit/ from the root of your MediaWiki installation.
 * 3) If you wish, open ConfirmEdit.php and customize $wgCaptchaTriggers, $ceAllowConfirmedEmail</tt>, and $wgCaptchaWhitelist</tt>.
 * 4) Change the $wgCaptchaClass</tt> line in ConfirmEdit.php</tt> to:
 * 5) Add the following lines to LocalSettings.php</tt> in the root of your MediaWiki installation:
 * 6) Open FancyCaptcha.php</tt> and set the variable $wgCaptchaDirectory</tt> to the directory where you will store Captcha images.  Below it set $wgCaptchaSecret</tt> to your passphrase.
 * 7) Create the images by running the following, where:
 * 8) * font is a path to some font, for instance AriBlk.TTF.
 * 9) * wordlist is a path to some word list, for instance /usr/share/dict/words. (Note: on Debian/Ubuntu, the 'wbritish' and 'wamerican' packages provide such lists. On Fedora, use the 'words' package).
 * 10) * key is the the exact passphrase you set $wgCaptchaSecret</tt> to. Use quotes if necessary.
 * 11) * output is the path to where the images should be stored (defined in $wgCaptchaDirectory</tt>).
 * 12) * count is how many images to generate.
 * 13) * An example, assuming you're in the extensions/ConfirmEdit directory (font location from Ubuntu 6.06, probably different on other operating systems):
 * 14) * If you are not satisfied with the results of the words you've generated you can simply remove the images and create a new set. Comic_Sans_MS_Bold.ttf seems to generate relatively legible words, and you could also edit the last line of captcha.py to increase the font size from the default of 40.
 * 1) * An example, assuming you're in the extensions/ConfirmEdit directory (font location from Ubuntu 6.06, probably different on other operating systems):
 * 2) * If you are not satisfied with the results of the words you've generated you can simply remove the images and create a new set. Comic_Sans_MS_Bold.ttf seems to generate relatively legible words, and you could also edit the last line of captcha.py to increase the font size from the default of 40.
 * 1) * If you are not satisfied with the results of the words you've generated you can simply remove the images and create a new set. Comic_Sans_MS_Bold.ttf seems to generate relatively legible words, and you could also edit the last line of captcha.py to increase the font size from the default of 40.
 * 1) * If you are not satisfied with the results of the words you've generated you can simply remove the images and create a new set. Comic_Sans_MS_Bold.ttf seems to generate relatively legible words, and you could also edit the last line of captcha.py to increase the font size from the default of 40.

Note that FancyCaptcha is quite sensitive to version mismatch. In order to successfully install FancyCaptcha on the legacy versions of MediaWiki, try to use FancyCaptcha revisions, that are known to work for your MediaWiki version:

How to avoid common problems running Python
C:\python\python.exe C:\Ex\CAPTCHA.py --font C:\Ex\FONT.ttf --wordlist C:\Ex\LIST.txt --key=YOURPASSWORD --output C:\Ex\ --count=20
 * 1) The captcha.py version 29357 is not supported on newer versions of Python, this is due to deprecated md5 although you can use 2.4x.
 * 2) Install the properly version of Python Imaging Library (PIL) 1.5 for Python 2.4.
 * 3) Make the installation of Python on a short folder name. Like C:\Python\
 * 4) Create folder like C:\Ex and place files CAPTCHA.py / FONT.ttf / LIST.txt into the folder.
 * 5) To execute easily run the following example as a batch file:

VisualMathCaptcha
Extension VisualMathCaptcha can be used, as FancyCaptcha, to do so :
 * 1) Open ConfirmEdit.php</tt>, in ConfirmEdit extension directory, and change $wgCaptchaClass</tt> value to VisualMathConfirmCaptcha</tt>.
 * 2) Add following line in LocalSettings.php, VisualCaptcha inclusion lines :

Captcha url whitelist
It is now possible to define a whitelist of known good sites for which the captcha should not kick in.

Sysops users can do this simply be editing the system message page called MediaWiki:captcha-addurl-whitelist. The expected format is a set of regex's one per line. Comments can be added with # prefix. Example in use on OpenStreetMap

Server administrators might prefer to create a regex more directly/secretly with the $wgCaptchaWhitelist config variable

Some other new config vars: These are are described more thoroughly in the code comments
 * $wgCaptchaWhitelistIP - List of IP ranges to allow to skip the captcha
 * $ceAllowConfirmedEmail - Allow users who have confirmed their e-mail addresses to post URL links

Examples of websites using this extension

 * Dutch wiki 'Klusopedia' on DIY and home improvement