Extension:ConfirmEdit/en

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.

ConfirmEdit ships with several techniques/modules to generate captcha.

Some of these modules require additional setup work:


 * MathCaptcha requires both the presence of TeX and, for versions of MediaWiki after 1.17, the extension;
 * FancyCaptcha requires running a preliminary setup script in Python.

Drawbacks
CAPTCHAs reduce accessibility and cause inconvenience to human users.

They also are not 100% effective against bots, and they will not protect your wiki from spammers who are willing and able to use human labor to get through the CAPTCHAs. You may wish to use ConfirmEdit in conjunction with other anti-spam features. Regardless of the solution you use, if you have a publicly-editable wiki it's important to keep monitoring the "Recent changes" page.

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

QuestyCaptcha
This module presents a question and the user supplies the answer. You provide the questions in the configuration. This module has proven to offer a strong mechanism against spam bots; it also should have the advantage of a better accessibility, as textual questions can be read by text-to-speech sofware allowing visually impaired users (but not bots) to answer correctly. Add the following to  to enable this CAPTCHA, editing the Q&A:

You can also configure ConfirmEdit's triggers and other options. If the Captcha does not appear, add the following below the extension code. By setting any individual option to, the Captcha will be triggered when performing the named action. Otherwise you can write  to disable Captcha for this action.

It will randomly choose a question from those supplied.

The minimum is one.
 * QuestyCaptcha is case-insensitive. If the answer is "Paris" and the user writes "paris", or if the answer is "paris" and the user writes "Paris", it will still work.
 * If the answer has a special character like "ó", you may write an answer with "ó" and another without, just in case. For example, if the answer is "canción" you can use  in case the user writes "cancion".
 * The answer must be easy to guess for a human interested in your wiki, but not by an automatic program. Ideally, it should not be contained in the text of the question; you can try and edit the captcha help messages and provide the solution to the captcha response there.
 * Just change the questions when/if they start proving ineffective; this may never happen if your wiki is not specifically targeted.
 * Don't ever reuse questions already used by you or others in the past: spambots are known to remember a question and its answer forever once they broke it.
 * You can even dynamically generate questy captchas in the configuration. DO NOT use an exact copy of the dynamic questions from the link, they've been cracked by spammers. However other dynamic questions in the style of the questions presented are highly effective.

ReCaptcha (NoCaptcha)
The new generation of ReCaptcha, called NoCaptcha, was introduced by Google back in December 2014 and reduces the need for humans to solve a CAPTCHA. Based on a user-side JavaScript (which can't be controlled by the user the administrator), reCaptcha tries to identify the site user as a human by analyzing their browsing behavior on the page. The user then has to click an "I'm not a robot" checkbox and (in the best case) doesn't have to do anything further to prove they're a human. However, in some cases, the user still has to solve a CAPTCHA image.

This module implements the new ReCaptcha NoCaptcha solution in ConfirmEdit.

You still need a public and a secret key (which you can retrieve from the ReCaptcha admin panel – change v2, v3 not work) and install the plugin with:

There is an additional configuration option for this module,  (default: ), which, if set to, sends the IP address of the current user to a server from Google while verifying the CAPTCHA. You can improve the privacy for your users if you keep this set to. However, remember, that this module adds a client side JavaScript code, directly loaded from a server from Google, which already can collect the IP address of the user (combined with other data, too) and can not be limited by a configuration option. This will only work on standard MediaWiki editor.

SimpleCaptcha (calculation)
This is the default CAPTCHA.

This module provides a simple addition or subtraction question for the user.

Add the following lines to  in the root of your MediaWiki to enable this CAPTCHA:

Note that the display of a trivial maths problem as plaintext yields a captcha which can be trivially solved by automated means; as of 2012, sites using SimpleCaptcha are receiving significant amounts of spam and many automated registrations of spurious new accounts. Wikis currently using this as the default should therefore migrate to one of the other CAPTCHAs.

FancyCaptcha
This module displays a stylized image of a set of characters.

Pillow must be installed in order to create the set of images initially, but isn't needed after that (can be installed with  in most environments).
 * 1) Add the following lines to   in the root of your MediaWiki installation:
 * MediaWiki version is 1.25 or newer:
 * MediaWiki version is older than 1.25:
 * 1) In , set the variable   to the directory where you will store Captcha images. Below it set   to your passphrase.
 * 2) Create the images by running the following, where:
 * 3) * font is a path to some font, for instance AriBlk.TTF.
 * 4) * wordlist is a path to some word list, for instance . (Note: on Debian/Ubuntu, the 'wbritish' and 'wamerican' packages provide such lists. On Fedora, use the 'words' package)
 * 5) * key is the exact passphrase you set  to. Use quotes if necessary.
 * 6) * output is the path to where the images should be stored (defined in ).
 * 7) * count is how many images to generate.
 * 8) * An example, assuming you're in the  directory (font location from Ubuntu 6.06, probably different on other operating systems):
 * 9) * 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.
 * 10) Put the images you get into   directory in your installation.
 * 11) Edit your wiki's : specify full path to your captcha directory in   and secret key you've been using while generating captures in.
 * 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.
 * 2) Put the images you get into   directory in your installation.
 * 3) Edit your wiki's : specify full path to your captcha directory in   and secret key you've been using while generating captures in.
 * 1) Edit your wiki's : specify full path to your captcha directory in   and secret key you've been using while generating captures in.

See also Generating CAPTCHAs for how Wikimedia Foundation does it.


 * How to avoid common problems running Python on Windows


 * 1) Install the most recent version of Pillow.
 * 2) Make the installation of Python on a short folder name, like C:\Python\
 * 3) Create a folder like C:\Ex and place files CAPTCHA.py / FONT.ttf / LIST.txt into the folder.
 * 4) To execute easily, run the following example as a batch file:

 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

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

Set the following to enable this CAPTCHA: See the  file in the math folder to install this captcha.

hCaptcha
See https://www.hcaptcha.com/

The configuration is similar to ReCaptcha: is also available.

Configuration
ConfirmEdit introduces a  permission type to. This lets you set certain groups to never see CAPTCHAs. All of the following can be added to. Defaults from : To skip captchas for users that confirmed their email, you need to set both: 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. Requires to be set to something other than   in your , if in doubt the following will always work. Note that   does not trigger captchas on API login, but instead blocks them outright until   expires.

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.

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  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 on OpenStreetMap.

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

Some other variables you can add to : These are described more thoroughly in the code comments
 * $wgCaptchaWhitelistIP - List of IP ranges to allow to skip the CAPTCHA (you can also use MediaWiki:Captcha-ip-whitelist; see below for details).
 * $ceAllowConfirmedEmail - Allow users who have confirmed their e-mail addresses to post URL links

MediaWiki:Captcha-ip-whitelist can be used to change the whitelisted IP addresses and IP ranges on wiki.

They should be separated by newlines.

If any other character (apart from a valid IP address or range) is found on a line, it will be ignored but leading and trailing whitespace characters are allowed.

For example, a line with only  is considered valid but   will be ignored.

Regular expressions
The global variable wgCaptchaRegexes accepts an array of regexes to be tested against the page text and will trigger the CAPTCHA in case of a match.

Wikimedia approach
For example, wikis use FancyCaptcha with a custom set of images and the default configuration, modified by what follows. This means only unregistered and newly registered users have to pass the CAPTCHA.

EmergencyCaptcha mode
Additionally the shortcut named  is designed for use in a limited number of emergency situations, for instance in case of massive vandalism or spam attacks: it changes the default trigger values (see above) into the following: So all anonymous and new users have to solve a CAPTCHA also before being able to save an edit or create a new page, in addition to the normal situation.

Rate-limiting
With, ConfirmEdit supports rate limiting for false CAPTCHA.

For more information about and how to set it up, read, the action key is.

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.

Additional maintenance work was done by Yaron Koren.