Anti-Spam Registration Question

[Switch]

The simplest and most effective anti-spam measure is asking a simple question. Currently, the Pfhorums uses "What's the number in Simplici7y?" and users can answer "7" or "seven" with any capitalization. As you might have noticed, a bot or two has snuck in. I wanted to change it to "How many polygons in a Simplici7y map?" but the difference between the challenge and the website might confuse very new users. Do you have any better ideas for very simple registration questions?

[Wrkncacnter]

Q: Where do you like to camp?

A: Stop camping.

[patrick]

Q: how many Rs are there in mararthon?


Q: how many of patrick's previous posts could be made using the current forum software?


Q: how many w'rkncacnters can you spot in this photo:

jons.jpg (39.21 KiB) Viewed 26192 times

[Destiny]

Q: What was Marathon originally released on?

Q: How many difficulties for Marathon are there?

Q: Finish this sentence: "Frog blast the ______!"

[patrick]

Q: Please


A: Stop

[Zott]

I don't think we should rely too heavily on Marathon culture, especially if we are having Halo converts who don't know that much about the game yet.


How smart do you imagine the bots are? Could we just have something like this?

Q : The answer is Marathon.
A : Marathon

Or maybe bots are smart enough to copy and paste parts of the question back into the answer. If so, how about the following:

Q: What company made Marathon?
A: Bungie

Anybody could look that up, but then maybe so could a bot. We could do something visual, that computers shouldn't understand the context too well.

Q: What direction is the arrow facing? ->
A: Right

[Switch]

I don't think we should rely too heavily on Marathon culture, especially if we are having Halo converts who don't know that much about the game yet.

Exactly. If it were just for us, it would be really easy.

How smart do you imagine the bots are? Could we just have something like this?

Q : The answer is Marathon.
A : Marathon

It looks like some are getting past "What is the number in," and if I were writing one of these bots "The answer is" would be the first thing I'd look for.

Q: What company made Marathon?
A: Bungie

Anybody could look that up, but then maybe so could a bot. We could do something visual, that computers shouldn't understand the context too well.

Apparently some bots do have the ability to Google the question and attempt to pull an answer from that.

Q: What direction is the arrow facing? ->
A: Right

I like this one.

[Crater Creator]

I think you give the spambots too much credit. It's more likely they are guessing the answer by brute force, and it's the fact that the answer is a single character, '7', that's letting them get through relatively easily. Accordingly, a good answer would be much like a good password: a minimum number of characters, a combination of letters/numbers/symbols, not a word from the dictionary, etc.

To make it hard for a bot to google an answer or mine the answer from the question, use referential words like "here" and "this":

Q: What game is primarily discussed here?
A: Marathon
A: Aleph One

Q: The name of this site is a combination of what base words?
A: forum
A: Pfhor

Q: This is the symbol of what game?
A: Marathon

[Crater Creator]

And come to think of it, we should delete this thread once a new question is decided, so spambots don't mine the answer out of this very page!

[Pfhorrest]

Q: how many w'rkncacnters can you spot in this photo:

jons.jpg

I should totally replace the PiD monsters in Eternal chapter 5 with flying irons.

Just to make it more obvious that they are W'rkncacnter.

[patrick]

flying irons

Previously I felt negligent in not posting a response to your question on the ESB, but I am glad that we have now stumbled upon the way forward for your project.

[Destiny]

Speaking of irons, I stumbled across a movie on Hulu called Circle of Iron. Just thought I'd mention the odd title.

[Ares Ex Machina]

Why not make the question an image of text rather than writing it with actual text?

I also agree that the question shouldn't alienate newcomers.

[Smythe]

Just using an image would work fine, it's not too hard to find a Number in a word, but almost impossible for them to find it in an image.

[Crater Creator]

Thank you to our moderators/administrators for dealing with the recent influx of spam and making the Pfhorums usable again.

[herecomethej2000]

Here is partial knowledge based question a simple goolge search wouldn't solve, a parse of the question wouldn't find the answer, and you don't have to know marathon to figure out.

What is the last piece to move in this sequence?
1. e4 e5, 2. Nf3

[Switch]

Thank you to our moderators/administrators for dealing with the recent influx of spam and making the Pfhorums usable again.

Thanks!

Backstory for those that haven't been emailing/PMing me (contact info on rkuykendall.com): A few days ago we got a small influx of spam. Me and $lave cleaned it up, and I switched the questions up a tiny bit. A few more bots registered, so I switched the site from Q&A to reCaptcha.

That was an awful idea. Cue the massive influx of spammers. Me and $lave worked to delete all the spammers accounts and posts, fix some database problems I caused, and I wrote some new Q&A questions. And it looks like it worked!

[Destiny]

Yay! Thank you Switch and $lave! The Pfhorums can be spambot free again!

[patrick]

Yay! The Pfhorums can be spambot free again!

{ever dutiful in homage to the new}

[ukimalefu]

the spammer spammed the anti-spam thread. I bet he did it on purpose, the bastard.

[Crater Creator]

Yeah, I was going to point out the irony but wasn't sure what to say exactly. Hopefully an admin can delete leticiaelhip's account and posts soon, and that will be the end of it.

[Asylum]

i for one welcome our new spambot slumlords.