Captcha on login

[Aranuvir]

Each time I login to the forum, I get the notice to have exceeded the number of logins and need to solve the captcha. Security issues? Brute force attacks to the user accounts?

[joepal]

Hard to say. I haven't noticed anything in particular.

Does the same happen if you log out explicitly, close the browser, re-open the browser and then try to log in again?

Are you accessing the forum from several different computers and/or cell phones?

[Aranuvir]

Hi Joel,

I'm accessing the forum just from a single computer, no phone. Usually I stay logged in. But sometimes I delete the browser cache, then I have to log in again. That's when I started to notice the issue. Same problem when I tried a clean restart, i.e. logged out, closed all tabs, cleaned browser cache and restarted the browser. Is it possible the number of log in attempts has changed? Perhaps it would be helpful to have a counter of 'invalid log in attempts since last log in' in the user control panel.

[joepal]

I haven't touched the forum software in quite some time. Unfortunately phpbb is one of the messiest systems I've seen the source code of, so it's not trivial to debug this or figure out how to add features. (It's possible, just very time consuming)

[Aranuvir]

Ok. It's not a great deal to me, solving the captcha. I was just wondering, what's going on. Maybe the problem is just on my side. Anyway, perhaps keep an eye on your log files, if there are unusual activities.

[joepal]

Yes, thanks. I will do an analysis of the log files to see if someone is playing silly buggers.

Your problem has been mentioned before btw, like half a year ago. I didn't see anything specific then, and the problem disappeared on it's own. So I put it down to some random temporary quirk and didn't think more about it.

[Aranuvir]

[...] I didn't see anything specific then, and the problem disappeared on it's own. [...]

Hopefully it's just 'much ado about nothing' from me. Thanks for helping, Joel.

[grinsegold]

I have the same "problem". Maybe you could at least change the captcha daily? A random captcha for each trial would make me feel a lot safer though.

[wolgade]

I have the same "problem".

Me too, but just since today. Never had this problem before.

[joepal]

I never figured out why this pops up. I've seen it too at some point, and a few days later it stops happening.