No I'm not a robot, please put up my post

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RubyWings91
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15 May 2016, 9:20 am

Posting has always been an issue for me on this site. I came up with an approach to reduce this problem but lately even this approach has been ruined by a new problem.

When I first came onto this site, I found that sometimes I would write up a post in an ongoing discussion and when I would go to post it or even before that, the website would just make it vanish and I would have to start over again. It's a problem I know that other people are still having today because I've occasionally come across the complaints from other users. In order to avoid this problem, I started typing my posts on a word document and then pasting them to the reply boxes to post on the site. For years this has worked out fine.

Now, in the last few weeks, after being away for a while, I tried to use this method and found that the site asks me, every time I do this, "Am I a robot?" This would not be a big problem if afterward, once I have passed the little picture test, the site would put up my post, which, for Private Messages it actually does. Unfortunately, every time this happens on a forum, I will prove I am not a Robot only to be sent back to the Posting page, where I will try again and once again get the question. This cycle will go on as such until I type out everything word for word in the post block.

When I get really interested in a topic, I can spend hours writing a post. Before I started typing on word, the lost posts led to many tear filled meltdowns. Now, for the first time in years, I am getting that again with WP. I have always counted on this site as one of the places I could come to relieve my stress by speaking people who can relate to my problems.

If this problem is not addressed, I am afraid that it will ultimately drive me away from here. It makes me sad to think that I might have to give this up because I love being here but it's not worth the stress that it is now causing me.



Fnord
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15 May 2016, 10:14 am

Word embeds code into the document that is not displayed in submitted posts. These codes may confuse the captchabot that you are a spambot. Use Notepad, instead. It does not embed formatting codes, and is less likely to confuse the captchabot.


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sly279
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15 May 2016, 11:32 am

Also it won't allow long posts,mor posts with more then one quote in it

I usually type mine in the reply box then select all and copy, then hit submit, then I paste it and try again and again and again etc.

Hugs

Hope you don't end up leaving



Aristophanes
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15 May 2016, 12:17 pm

Fnord wrote:
Word embeds code into the document that is not displayed in submitted posts. These codes may confuse the captchabot that you are a spambot. Use Notepad, instead. It does not embed formatting codes, and is less likely to confuse the captchabot.


Really? The site doesn't even have a honeypot to catch spam, you really think someone's got a well programmed validation plugin running server-side? It's probably just the rote PHP validation, and it doesn't give a s**t, just that there's data. The database won't spit an error either because chances are anything posted will conform to the field since it's blob format. I don't know how cloudflare works exactly, but I'm assuming the most they do is check IP ranges for known threats and give a quick over to find malicious code, of which normal wordpad encoding wouldn't set it off. This is all assuming that the web browser itself doesn't pre-clean the text on paste (most do). It's just a broken system here and nothing to do with the end-user, which is why people get so pissed off about it.

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All that said, there's no need to paste into another program. Merely press back 2 or 3 times on your browser and your typed text should still be there on the posting page since most browsers cache the page before performing any non ajax database operations. Basically when the page knows it's going to have a refresh, the browser will store the page as is-- including things you've typed into inputs. This isn't standardized, but most browsers have this capability precisely for the issues we're encountering.
*One caveat: this doesn't work on a secured connection for security reasons so it will only work if the form's address is HTTP and not HTTPS.



MissAlgernon
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15 May 2016, 1:26 pm

It does have something to do with the user. I noticed some keyword combinations automatically trigger captcha and Cloudflare security. If I try posting exactly the same, I'll still get the same problem. One time, it was due to one sentence in my post, that I had to rewrite in order to stop getting Cloudflare messages.



Aristophanes
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15 May 2016, 1:31 pm

MissAlgernon wrote:
It does have something to do with the user. I noticed some keyword combinations automatically trigger captcha and Cloudflare security. If I try posting exactly the same, I'll still get the same problem. One time, it was due to one sentence in my post, that I had to rewrite in order to stop getting Cloudflare messages.

Again though that's not your fault, it's poor programming. What's the use of programming something no one can use? That's the entire point of programming is to make things easier for end users (average people).
Also it could just be coincidence it actually went through the last time. I've had to re-post up to four times before and I never changed my words, just kept hitting my head against the door until it opened.



MissAlgernon
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15 May 2016, 1:44 pm

Google Translate was a disaster and almost completely unusable when it started. Progress has been more and more noticeable. In the beginning, you need to regularly use almost unusable AI if you want to improve it. Developers can't improve its code if it isn't regularly used at very large scale for a long time. It's a necessary evil to have something that works in the end.
What happened wasn't a coincidence. I tried to post this wall of text I wrote many times, I tested it sentence by sentence, and it was successful only after I changed a few keywords in a specific sentence. It doesn't surprise me. Spambots use unnatural keyword combinations that gives hints about the fact that they're spambots, so I don't see why this wouldn't be used as a way to detect them. Same with using a lot of "weird" keys or a lot of spaces.



Aristophanes
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15 May 2016, 1:51 pm

MissAlgernon wrote:
Google Translate was a disaster and almost completely unusable when it started. Progress has been more and more noticeable. In the beginning, you need to regularly use almost unusable AI if you want to improve it. Developers can't improve its code if it isn't regularly used at very large scale for a long time. It's a necessary evil to have something that works in the end.
What happened wasn't a coincidence. I tried to post this wall of text I wrote many times, I tested it sentence by sentence, and it was successful only after I changed a few keywords in a specific sentence. It doesn't surprise me. Spambots use unnatural keyword combinations that gives hints about the fact that they're spambots, so I don't see why this wouldn't be used as a way to detect them. Same with using a lot of "weird" keys or a lot of spaces.


Any idea what words or word combos not to use?



MissAlgernon
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15 May 2016, 2:02 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering
They must collect statistics to find what combinations indicate spambots. Apparently they've done this for a long time.
And texts with spaces between every letter and tons of weird keys to prevent keyword recognition are almost always spambots anyway... Even the few that aren't are people who don't write proper English just because they think it looks "pretty", I don't mind if they're blocked, that will teach them to write in English next time.



RubyWings91
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15 May 2016, 4:11 pm

Thanks for all the advice. I will try applying it and see if it makes things easier for me.



Kiprobalhato
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16 May 2016, 12:23 am

it makes modding a bigger pain than it usually already is. :idea:


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RubyWings91
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16 May 2016, 9:53 am

Yeah, it does. Hopefully they can make it easier again in the future.



Kiprobalhato
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17 May 2016, 1:41 am

if the experiences of the old mods are anything to go by, these new mod tools are more limited, but they work much, much better.


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