In the Coppermine photo album on one of my websites I suddenly got a lot of comment spam. The causes are obvious. I’m allowing non-registered users to post comments on popular web photo album software.
As I don’t want to force the administration of registered users on my website to either my users or myself I don’t want to change that. But I also don’t want to switch from photo album software.
One solution is using Captcha (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) images. I already implement captcha on a coppermine photo album a few years ago but for that implementation I needed to change multiple lines in multiple files. In September 2006 however, Sami made Captcha available for Coppermine using a plugin which can be implemented in 3 easy steps:
(0.Uninstall any older version of this plugin)
- Copy captcha folder to your plugins folder
- Use plugin manager to install it
- Copy captcha.php to gallery root
The plugin manager can be found when logged in with adminstrator rights through:
“config” -> “general settings” -> “Enable plugins” -> “plugin manager”
captcha.php can be found in the captcha folder in the zip-file.
For download and more information, check http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=36319.0.
Update 29-11-2009: After upgrading a Coppermine installation suddenly the SPAM protection didn’t work anymore. To my surprise I Googled myself upon my own website; this page :). It’s still very valid. New plugin versions are added to the post and you still don’t need to do any coding yourself. Great stuff!
