q2a-number-captcha

A Question2Answer CAPTCHA plugin that asks for one digit of a nine-digit number written out in words.

Status: Retired Deliberately ended.
Dates: Started Nov 16, 2014
Where: github.com/jthingelstad/q2a-number-captcha
Topics: Play
Latest evidence: Latest commit, Nov 28, 2015

I had used Question2Answer for several years to run Ask Planet Kubb, and spam registrations were the problem. ReCaptcha let through four to ten spam sign-ups a day. The Q2A Logical Captcha plugin, to which I had contributed a pull request, let through three to four times as many.

So I brought over the defense I was already using on my MediaWiki wikis, which I had first written in 2013 to stop spam sign-ups on WikiApiary and later switched to numbers spelled out in words (Updated Dynamic Questy Captchas). The plugin spells out a random nine-digit number with the Numbers_Words PHP package and asks for the digit in one position, so the answer never appears in the page. It started as a modified copy of Q2A Logical Captcha. I released it on November 16, 2014 under the GPL v2, reporting that early results were great. The last change, in 2015, removed a PHP warning, and the repository is archived.

Activity

3 commits, all by me, the first on Nov 15, 2014.

Commits each year from 2014 to 2015, most in 2014 (2). By me With an agent By others

The latest weeks with activity

Week of Nov 23, 2015 1 commit by me
- Remove PHP warning.
Week of Nov 10, 2014 2 commits, all by me
- Initial commit. Appears to be working.
- Initial commit

All activity, week by week. Who made each commit is from its author and co-author lines.

Sources and evidence

Observed daily from GitHub, sitemaps, feeds, the Internet Archive, and Tinylytics. Evidence never sets a status.

jthingelstad/q2a-number-captcha implementation archived on GitHub

CAPTCHA Plugin for Question2Answer that requires finding a digit in a large number.
- Repository created Nov 16, 2014 (a development record, not a launch date)
- PHP
- Latest commit Nov 28, 2015; 0 commits on master between Jul 20, 2026 and Oct 18, 2026
- Observed Oct 18, 2026

Commits and publications per month, last twelve months.

Connections

q2a-number-captcha protected Ask Planet Kubb

I wrote the plugin to stop spam registrations on Ask Planet Kubb, the Question2Answer site I ran. Source

History

Nov 16, 2014 launch A number captcha for Question2Answer
I release a spelled-out-number captcha to stop spam sign-ups on Ask Planet Kubb. Source