Proof-of-work rather than a puzzle, and — the reason for it — nothing
about the person signing up is described to a third party in order to let
them in. Turnstile and then hCaptcha were both here; both told Cloudflare
who was at the door.
The `cap` service runs on the compose network with its own Redis
database, kept apart from the app's so a flush of one cannot clear the
other's challenges. The widget talks to /cap/ on this origin, proxied by
the frontend's nginx, so the browser reaches nobody else either. Caddy
passes the whole host through to that container, so it needed no change.
Two things that had to be found rather than read:
Cap's key API is undocumented. The routes are `/auth/login` and
`/server/keys`, and the Bearer value is base64 JSON of `{token, hash}` —
not the session token itself, which is why the obvious call returns
"Malformed session token". The site key and secret were created that way
rather than by hand in a dashboard.
And an nginx proxy_pass whose target is a variable passes the URI through
untouched: the trailing slash that strips a location prefix on a literal
target does nothing. Cap was being asked for /cap/<key>/challenge and
answering NOT_FOUND until the prefix was stripped by an explicit rewrite.
Verified end to end against the running service: a challenge is issued
through the public path, and a token that was never issued is refused
rather than waved through.
Also here: the register modal's Name and Email were bare labels that
neither wrapped their input nor named it, so a screen reader met two
boxes with no names and clicking the word did nothing.
And the knowledge profile paginates ten to a page and expands each row to
its two bars beside the next step. "Correct using hints" is missing from
that bar because /study-tools/recommendations does not carry it per
topic — inferring it from the lifetime figure would be a different set of
answers, so the bar is honestly two-tone until the backend offers it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
One verifier, backend/app/services/captcha.py, and one widget,
components/Captcha.jsx. There were two copies of each and they had
drifted: the register widget loaded the script itself while the landing
one relied on a page-level effect elsewhere in its file, and on the
backend auth failed *open* on an unreachable Turnstile while contact
failed *shut*.
Both failure modes were kept rather than one quietly chosen, as an
explicit `fail_open` argument with the reason written down: an outage that
stops people creating accounts costs the site its users, while an outage
that bounces a contact message costs the sender one retry.
An unconfigured secret still skips verification entirely, as before, so a
site with no keys keeps working.
The keys in .env are empty. The Cloudflare ones there were live and are
now dead, so **there is no captcha on register or contact until hCaptcha
keys are issued** — this is not a state to leave a public site in.
Also corrected on the way: docs/frontend.md still documented
`login(email, password, turnstileToken)`, whose third argument had
already gone from AuthContext.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
Tutor questions require owned selected attempts; similarity context filters eligibility before ranking. Uploads move to a permission-aware boundary with reference ACLs, canonical legacy aliases, pre-mutation attachment checks and card-aware moderator rules. Nginx stops caching media and supplies native byte ranges. Verified 37 deployed-image backend tests, 69 frontend tests/build, real pgvector/Nginx/browser checks, and two independent reviews.
Remove the challenge from standalone and landing login plus backend verification; retain registration/contact protection and existing password, email verification, SSO and login rate-limit checks. Verified 18 backend tests in deployed image and 17 frontend tests plus build.
