Ari's super-secure, super-secret, super-anti-bot technologly

[Aurangzeb Khan]

Your Niftiness,

Would it be possible to arrange a technology transfer between Babkha and Shireroth so that the desert sands might be purged of Mondesian pests once and for all.

[Ari Rahikkala]

It's hardly necessary for the Kaiser to be involved in such a transfer. You might need Rashid to authorise or Darius to implement the changes over on your end, but here's the description on how I did it here (the same way I did it back when we were on phpBB2):

I changed the name of the textarea field "message" to "message_antibot". It doesn't matter what the name is, just as long as it's not "message". This change is basically akin to adding a check button asking "Are you human?" to the posting screen, except more transparent to users. If we get spammed by someone who actually wants to target us specifically and has more than five seconds to spare to configure their software, or if the spammers are actually Chinese slaves or something, it's not going to have any effect... however, it does confuse the really simple-minded spambots.

Here are the files and approximate places that I changed. I ended up changing the names in both the message posting and message drafting system since you can save drafts from the posting screen and it was easier to just go ahead and change more things around than to consider what I'm actually doing...

styles/malarbor/template/posting_body.php:
var text_name = 'message_antibot'; -- to keep the Javascript stuff around the message box working
<textarea name="message_antibot" etc.

ucp_main_drafts.html: <textarea class="post" name="message_antibot" etc.

(I then copied these to all the other styles' template directories)

posting.php:
$message = utf8_normalize_nfc(request_var('message_antibot', '', true));
$message_parser->message = utf8_normalize_nfc(request_var('message_antibot', '', true));
'message_antibot' => $message, -- in the $s_hidden_fields = build_hidden_fields bit

includes/ucp/ucp_main.php: $draft_message = utf8_normalize_nfc(request_var('message_antibot', '', true));
includes/ucp/ucp_pm_compose.php: $message = utf8_normalize_nfc(request_var('message_antibot', '', true));
includes/ucp/ucp_pm_compose.php: $message_parser->message = utf8_normalize_nfc(request_var('message_antibot', '', true));

[Aurangzeb Khan]

You might need Rashid to authorise or Darius to implement the changes over on your end

That is more or less how it will go. Many thanks!

[Ari Rahikkala]

I'll have you know, by the way, that I was very much on the edge trying to decide whether to say Ric and Trevon or Rashid and Darius

[Aurangzeb Khan]

Either is good but I would have been forced to Babkhanise the quote when forwarding it to the cabinet.