We’ve had a recent spate of bogus accounts being added to the Learning Labs, probably with the intent of posting spam messages in groups they could get access to. Since most accounts of this nature are created by “bots” or computers infected with software designed to create accounts anywhere and everywhere possible, we’ve taken an additional security measure to help prevent non-humans from creating accounts.
A new field is in the new account form called a CAPTCHA. You’ve no doubt run into a similar field when creating accounts with other online services. The theory behind it is the words are readable (or hearable) by humans, but not by computers, and thus only a real person can create an account.
This will only affect people creating new accounts–your current Learning Labs accounts are not affected. I’ve tested the system and it works, though admittedly I got a string of about six illegible text strings at one point. If this happens to you just click Get another CAPTCHA to refresh the image.
So far we haven’t seen this type of behavior on our other sites, though if we do we may have to implement CAPTCHA technology on the likes of Depot and Coaching Calendar. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this causes, but we want to make sure the Learning Labs and all of Stratepedia continue to be useful tools for SIM® professional development.
patty | June 17th, 2009
Aaron,
Thank you for ensuring such security. I think that I understand that our password protected Learning Labs are exempt for now.
Aaron | June 17th, 2009
That’s correct. All that happened were some bogus accounts got created, but none of them were actually used to do anything.
Aaron
sherrel lee haight | June 18th, 2009
Thank you for your notice regarding security of the website. That is helpful.