Rezwan wrote:
I suspect there’s more we can do with the registration form to weed people out – .
As you may recall I’d solved the problem at the software coding forums I admin by shutting off registration and processing manuaIly any emailed reg requests. Nasty solution, and turned out to have severe drawbacks… but I was being overwhelmed and the optical captchas were both useless against the bots and an obstacle to the visually impaired.
But recently I found a solution hiding in the default forum software that works well, does not require visual acuity and does its own filtering.
In phpBB forums it’s called the Q&A captcha and it simply requires an answer to a question… but the question should be one that requires human cognition to solve and can’t be autogoogled by a bot.
(heh, he said “autogoogled”…)
In the forums mentioned above the questions are simple ones about the game we work with. Anyone with an actual interest should automatically know the answer or can find out quickly.
I turned registration back on and haven’t had a single bot slip through. And they try, oh do they keep trying…
Of course for FFS you’d want your own question/answer sets. Lerner-hakase’s SAT scores. Aarons shoe size. Why Derek is wearing that ridiculous tie (still hoping for a resonance cascade-type scenario here)…
Anyways, it does work very well and should continue to work well with the right question/answer sets.