Extension:ConfirmEdit

The ConfirmEdit extension lets you use various different CAPTCHA techniques, to try to prevent spambots and other automated tools from editing your wiki, as well as to foil automated login attempts that try to guess passwords.

The CAPTCHA techniques/modules included in ConfirmEdit are:
 * "SimpleCaptcha" - users have to solve an arithmetic math problem
 * "MathCaptcha" - users have to solve a math problem that's displayed as an image
 * "FancyCaptcha" - users have to identify a series of characters, displayed in a stylized way
 * "QuestyCaptcha" - users have to answer a question, out of a series of questions defined by the administrator(s)
 * "ReCaptcha" - users have to identify a series of characters, either visually or audially, from a widget provided by the reCAPTCHA service

Some of these techniques require additional setup work: MathCaptcha requires the presence of TeX, FancyCaptcha requires running a preliminary setup script in Python, and reCAPTCHA requires obtaining API keys.

Some caveats: CAPTCHAs reduce accessibility and cause inconvenience to human users. In addition, they are not 100% effective against bots, and they will not protect your wiki in any way from human spammers. You may wish to use ConfirmEdit in conjunction with other anti-spam features. And regardless of what solutions you use, if you have a publicly-editable wiki it's important to keep monitoring it via the "Recent changes" page.

Authors
The basic framework was designed largely by Brion Vibber, who also wrote the SimpleCaptcha and FancyCaptcha modules. The MathCaptcha module was written by Rob Church. The QuestyCaptcha module was written by Benjamin Lees. The reCAPTCHA module was written by Mike Crawford and Ben Maurer. Additional maintenance work was done by Yaron Koren.

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


 * Download the latest version and save it to your computer
 * Create a folder in the extensions folder named ConfirmEdit
 * Move 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:

Note: ConfirmEdit may not work if it's used with a MediaWiki version different from the one it's downloaded as via the "Extension distributor".

CAPTCHA types
There are five different CAPTCHA types included with ConfirmEdit.

SimpleCaptcha (calculation)
This is the default CAPTCHA. This module provides a simple addition or subtraction question for the user.

Set the following to enable this CAPTCHA:

MathCaptcha
This module generates an image using TeX to ask a basic math question.

Set the following to enable this CAPTCHA:

QuestyCaptcha
This module presents a question and the user supplies the answer. You provide the questions in the configuration.

Set the following to enable this CAPTCHA:

It will randomly choose a question from those supplied. The minimum is one.

FancyCaptcha
This module displays a stylized image of a set of characters. The Python Imaging Library must be installed in order to create the set of images initially, but isn't needed after that.


 * 1) Add the following lines to LocalSettings.php in the root of your MediaWiki installation:
 * 2) In LocalSettings.php, set the variable $wgCaptchaDirectory to the directory where you will store Captcha images.  Below it set $wgCaptchaSecret to your passphrase.
 * 3) Create the images by running the following, where:
 * 4) * font is a path to some font, for instance AriBlk.TTF.
 * 5) * 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).
 * 6) * key is the the exact passphrase you set $wgCaptchaSecret to. Use quotes if necessary.
 * 7) * output is the path to where the images should be stored (defined in $wgCaptchaDirectory).
 * 8) * count is how many images to generate.
 * 9) * An example, assuming you're in the extensions/ConfirmEdit directory (font location from Ubuntu 6.06, probably different on other operating systems):
 * 10) * 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.

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 proper 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 a 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:

ReCaptcha
This module uses the "reCAPTCHA" widget/service. It is both the most professional of the options available, and it performs a valuable service because it helps to digitize old books (read more here.)

To use this module, first go here and obtain a public and private key for your wiki. Then add the following to LocalSettings.php, below the inclusion of ConfirmEdit:

Two notes about the ReCaptcha module:
 * To use it, you must download the trunk/latest version of ConfirmEdit.
 * Unfortunately, reCAPTCHA might be a victim of its own success - as of 2011, some spammers appear to have figured out a way to bypass it, either through character recognition or by using humans. For that reason, it is not necessarily recommended.

VisualMathCaptcha
The extension VisualMathCaptcha can also be used, in conjunction with ConfirmEdit. See that extension's documentation for how to install and configure it.

Asirra
The Asirra extension adds Microsoft's kitten auth system to ConfirmEdit. See Asirra extension's documentation for installation and configuration advice.



Configuration
ConfirmEdit introduces a 'skipcaptcha' permission type to wgGroupPermissions. This lets you set certain groups to never see CAPTCHAs.

Defaults from ConfirmEdit.php:

To skip captchas for users that confirmed their email, you need to both set  and.

There are five "triggers" on which CAPTCHAs can be displayed:
 * 'edit' - triggered on every attempted page save
 * 'create' - triggered on page creation
 * 'addurl' - triggered on a page save that would add one or more URLs to the page
 * 'createaccount' - triggered on creation of a new account
 * 'badlogin' - triggered on the next login attempt after a failed one

The default values for these are:

The triggers,   and   can be configured per namespace using the   setting. If there is no  for the current namespace, the normal   apply. So suppose that in addition to the above  defaults we configure the following:

Then the CAPTCHA will not trigger when adding URLs to a talk page, but on the other hand user will need to solve a CAPTCHA any time they try to edit a page in the project namespace, even if they aren't adding a link.

A common alternate setting is to have a CAPTCHA only for unregistered users, on every edit. This can be accomplished by:

URL and IP whitelists
It is possible to define a whitelist of known "good" sites for which the CAPTCHA should not kick in, when the 'addurl' action is triggered.

Sysop users can do this by 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. You can see an example of this usage here, on OpenStreetMap.

This set of whitelist regexes can also be defined using the $wgCaptchaWhitelist config variable in LocalSettings.php, to keep the value(s) a secret.

Some other variables you can add to LocalSettings.php: 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

Test plan
See ConfirmEdit Test Plan.