All right, I downloaded a small portion of the forum to my laptop so I could do some tests. So I applied the changes and it appears to work fine. To enable it, one has to disable the current Captcha implementation, which is easy enough:
Go to the Admin Center, and navigate to the Security Settings link under the Security Center (on the left side). Select the
Validation Image
tab. The first first item:
Activate Validation code on registration, forgot password, and send topic
Is the one that enables/disables the validation image/code.
If this is disabled and the SpamFruits mod has been installed, then it should just work, This effectively means that with the mod installed there will *always* be some form of additional validation enabled - either spamfruits or the captcha implementation. This is probably a good thing though, while I was testing (and trying to figure out how to enable SpamFruits) I accidentally disabled captcha on the real forum and realized my mistake about 10-15 later. In that time, 35-40 fake accounts had been created!! That should give you some idea of how often the board is attacked.
The modification changes three files on the server and adds two images. All of the changes are small. I've backed up the original state of the files, and sent them to Vern along with the modification distro for SpamFruits. It looks like it's not available any longer online - at least for now. That's actually kind of helpful... something that isn't widely available is less likely to be targeted.
Also, I took a hard look at the change, and it would be easy to customize to make it unique for the forum if that becomes necessary.
It will be interesting to see how this improves things
Rob
