Looks like the spammers have been busy!!

[Nifty]

Ya, this has been worse than ever before! I'm working on a few anti-spam tricks that will hopefully slow them down, but not keep out legit members or cause more work for the moderators (not an easy problem to fix).

 

[Denim Deb]

SD, it's a local horse board.

 

[savingdogs]

DD, I bet you are good on that!

Nifty, thank you for all your hard work. We appreciate you! I don't know what those people think they are going to gain?

 

[Nifty]

Ok, I need some brain storming!

When peeps register we ask a question to help prevent spam bots from getting in. I'm thinking of making the question a little harder so foreign peeps will have to think about it a bit more (SEO spam is usually outsourced to India or the Philippines or China).

The current question:

Please enter the 3 letter word for the white thing that is laid by a female chicken.

On BYH I just changed it to this question:

Please enter the 5 letter word for that ends the URL for this website: backyard_ _ _ _ _.com
Hint: It is a group of animals.

So, can you help me come up with some questions for here that:

1) Won't be too difficult to slow down a legitimate member (even those that might not be good at answering questions)
2) Will be hard enough that someone will have to at least think a little bit before zipping through the registration process

Looking forward to your ideas!!!

 

[SKR8PN]

What is a 4 letter word for "you"
Hint: it is the last four letters of this websites URL



Nifty, can you substitute the "smeared letters" thing like they use when you sigh in on Craigslist?? The ones that change every time you log in.

 

[Nifty]

It is called a "captcha". The best one out there is called recaptcha (so good that Google bought it).

I may give that a try, but implementing it is a bit more work.

 

[SKR8PN]

It may be a little more work to set up, but hopefully it will SAVE you a ton of work, cleaning up the mess they leave!

 

[kcsunshine]

I hate those things. Half the time I can't tell what letter it is, or if it's a number instead of a letter - being old and half blind doesn't help either.

 

[Shiloh Acres]

I think the question idea is better for preventing spam. The captcha requires a human to type in the string but that just means you need a real person to type it.

Wish I had a great idea for a question, but that has the advantage of requiring someone to read and respond in English (and since this forum is in English, that doesn't seem unfairly restrictive).

Actually, I think I'd make it less simple but more intuitive for English speakers, if that were possible, but could be hard since you have people from so many countries who speak a slightly different English. That's the problem ... Everything harder I can think of is probably not commonly answered the same way in England or Australia, etc.

 

[Nifty]

I think I may have an anti-spam system that will solve most of our problems. Basically it gives any member with less than 10 posts that tries to post a URL in their post an error message.

That should slow down / stop 97.165% of spammers!

We're testing it at BYH, and if it works well there we'll roll it out to here and TEG, and then BYC!