This page last changed on Jun 02, 2007 by ernest@atlassian.com.

Captcha Configuration 

If your Confluence site is open to the public you may find that automated spam is being added, in the form of comments or new pages.

You can configure Confluence to deter automated spam by asking users to prove that they are human before they are allowed to:

  • Sign up for an account
  • Add a comment
  • Create a page
  • Edit a page

Captcha is the technical term for a test that can distinguish a human being from an automated agent such as a web spider or robot. When Captcha is enabled, users are required to read some text from an image (example on the right) and type it into the form.

When it is on, users will need to recognise a distorted picture of a word, and must type the word into a text field. This is easy for humans to do, but very difficult for computers.

You can choose which users don't have to complete Captchas. You can exempt signed-in users (they will have completed a Captcha when they signed up), or members of particular groups.

You can also customise the Captcha image (see Advanced Configuration below). 

To enable captchas for Confluence,

You need to be a site administrator to enable captcha.

  1. Click on the 'Administration' link in the top right corner of the screen.

  2. Choose Spam Configuration' from the Configuration menu on the left.

  3. Click on 'Change Space Logo' in the left panel under the heading 'Look and Feel'. This will bring up a new screen.

  4. Turn on captchas by clicking the 'ON' link.

To disable captcha for certain groups,

By default captchas will not be shown to registered users. Only anonymous users will have to perform the captcha test when creating comments or editing pages.

If you don't trust all registered users, captchas can also be disabled for only a certain group/groups of users.

  1. Select the 'Members of Group' and click the 'Save' button.

  2. Use the 'Group Picker' in the Groups menu and click the 'Add' button to add a single or multiple groups to the list.

  3. To remove a group from the list, click the 'Remove Symbol' behind the group name.

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 Advanced Configuration

You can also control which type of image is presented to your users. This requires editing the applicationContext.xml file which you can find in the confluence/WEB-INF/classes directory under your Confluence installation.

The section of this file which configures Captchas looks like this:

<!-- Image capture service -->
<!-- this is a very easy captcha generator. If you want difficult captures, uncomment the DefaultGimpyEngine below,
       or use an engine class from http://jcaptcha.sourceforge.net -->
<bean id="captchaEngine" class="com.atlassian.confluence.security.ConfluenceCaptchaEngine" autowire="byName"/>
<!--bean id="captchaEngine" class="com.octo.captcha.engine.image.gimpy.DefaultGimpyEngine" autowire="byName"-->
<bean id="captchaManager" class="com.atlassian.confluence.security.DefaultCaptchaManager" autowire="byName"/>

You can replace the 'captchaEngine' class with any text-based engine from jcaptcha.


captcha.png (image/png)
Document generated by Confluence on Oct 10, 2007 18:36