How to prevent comment spam in Coppermine

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)

  1. Copy captcha folder to your plugins folder
  2. Use plugin manager to install it
  3. 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!

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By Leendert

Leendert van Achteren is a Business Analyst and part-time Web Entrepreneur. He's building and managing websites with SEO in mind He's writing about anything that has his interest, but especially focusing on market transparency for consumers.

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