10 hour "mystery outage"

  • For about 10 hours yesterday night, until 30 minutes ago; there was some kind of “mystery outage” that affected the plugin. The symptom was that instead of the usual “please verify…” PNG image being displayed, there was a white text box with an HTML button that said “Verify.”

    I know this problem was widespread, because it not only affected my site, but the funcaptcha.co site as well.

    Could the developers please elaborate on the nature of this issue? I wasted many hours thinking there was some kind of theme, CSS or plugin issue; before realizing it affected funcaptcha.co as well.

    Specifically, I would like to know what caused the problem, and if there is some kind of safety mechanism, in case the plugin is totally unable to contact the funcaptcha server.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/funcaptcha/

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author FunCaptcha

    (@swipeads)

    Hi there wzp,

    This is actually a feature, not a bug – nor was it an outage, our servers were fine. We take great care in ensuring our service is always up and running and as such have a wide range of servers in different locations to prevent outages.

    What you experienced was what we consider “low bandwidth” mode. Normally we serve FunCaptcha in its full image based glory, auto loading on the page to ensure your users can fill it out as fast as possible. However we track how many times a user has viewed FunCaptcha without solving it – bots generally hit a page many thousands of times trying to break in/post spam. After a certain amount views without attempting to solve FunCaptcha, we show this low bandwidth version, where the images are not loaded by default until you click the plain HTML verify button.

    The game still works the exact same, and the count resets after 24 hours, or if you solve games it also increases, it’s just a DDoS prevention method as we can get hit many millions of times a day, it makes a big difference at scale, when the vast majority of people seeing this version are bots due to high page refreshes.

    The reason why it followed you site to site and computer to computer is because it’s based on your IP address (FunCaptcha served on our site is the same as what is served in your plugin and all of our other users sites, same settings follow you, etc), which would have been the same in all of those cases.

    To better clarify and to ensure people don’t have the same issue you did in future, we will add a section to our FAQ here: https://funcaptcha.co/faqs/ and we will add a note to the HTML screen with a link to that.

    Thread Starter The Assurer

    (@wzp)

    Thank you for the explanation. I guess I triggered something while doing my usability testing. Wish there was a convenient way to “reset it” from the settings panel…

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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