Altcha deployment and handling large amount of spammers accounts

Software Support
1

Describe the issue or problem
I have updated ojs to 3.5.0-4 and defined altcha settings in config file :

; Whether or not to enable ALTCHA
altcha = true

; Private key for ALTCHA
altcha_hmackey = '**APP_KEY**'

; Whether or not to use ALTCHA on user registration
altcha_on_register = on

; Whether or not to use ALTCHA on user login
altcha_on_login = on

; Whether or not to use ALTCHA on user lost password
altcha_on_lost_password = on

; The quantity of encryption cycles performed by the ALTCHA system
altcha_encrypt_number = 10000

I thought this was enough and altcha was included in ojs. I asked the journal manager as always to let me know if anything was wrong after update and told it’s ok (after a few days). But then contacted me to let me know that there are thousands of spam accounts on journal.
I checked :

Screenshot20260620092808
Screenshot202606200928081920×1080 216 KB

Real users are about 100, so I have to delete/merge all accounts that did not confirm their registrations.

So ended up using recaptcha.

Now I have to :

  1. handle this large amount of spammers
  2. ensure to altcha deployed on our server. In fact, I am maintaining the ojs package in yunohost and would like to make it easy for users to use altcha from the package (via the control panel)

What application are you using?
3.5.0-4

Additional information
Server is a yunohost 12.1.40.1 (stable)
PHP version is 8.2
Package link : GitHub - YunoHost-Apps/ojs_ynh: Open Journal systems package for YunoHost · GitHub