Captcha system seems to be not working normally

[codewrangler]

When updating or creating a Ticket, I get the error page without first being presented with a way to input or see a Captcha (see attachment). The error screen has no 'submit' button, but hitting the enter/return key causes the form to be submitted.

[codewrangler]

Captcha error

[luroh]

Since the captcha actually didn't seem to stop our recent spammer, maybe it should be removed.

[zooey]

I'm not sure, but I believe the described behaviour may just be how it is supposed to work:

AFAICS, the spamfilter plugin uses a couple of tests (both internal and external like mollom) to determine the quality of a ticket/comment. If that quality is above a configured level (currently 10 points), Trac will accept it, without showing the captcha.

Our current problem seems to be that the quality never reaches 10, so the captcha is shown for every submission. The cause of this seems to be that only the mollom and the bayes filter plugin actually increase the quality level, when they consider the contribution to be ok. I have no idea why the other configured plugins (e.g. akismet) never contribute to the quality level.

I have lowered the value for the minimum quality to 5 now, let's see how that works out.

BTW: the spammer we had recently didn't like the captcha very much and actually failed to solve it several times and gave up (only to come back at a later time). So I believe that the captcha did help getting rid of that spammer.

[zooey]

I think the spam-filter is working quite good now, the captcha is shown only rarely.