Hi. I will get on my hobby horse immediately and complain of the reliance on surveillance capitalist services on this site. uMatrix tells me that the site tries to pull in resources from the following domains:
For captcha:
- google.com
- www.google.com
- www.gstatic.com
This could be replaced by a simple question form like phpBB has. For example the freemxf.org used to just ask users what spec MXF is defined in (S377m). Requiring captcha on login is extra annoying.
I also noticed the following tracking stuff:
- facebook.net
- fonts.googleapis.com
- gravatar.com
- twitter.com
- platform.twitter.com
Fonts and gravatar might not count as tracking per se, but I threw them in because the stuff they do can be self-hosted.
The one thing that can really kill a site is spam, and I'd be really wary of removing the google captcha. I made some changes that should have removed most of the tracking stuff, except for gravatar.
Alright, that's an improvement at least 🙂
Domain-specific questions are a classic way to deal with spam
Alright, that's an improvement at least 🙂
Domain-specific questions are a classic way to deal with spam
The bigger threat isn't random bots, but an adversarial troll attacking the site, which has happened to left wing forums before. I imagine domain specific questions would be pretty easy to get around with a user specifically targeting a website, whereas captcha induces greater computational requirements for an attack.