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Time for a captcha or something on this NG?

Is it perhaps time to put some sort of captcha or something on the web
interface for this NG? The signal-to-noise ratio's kinda been getting
dragged down by the spambots.

One possibility would be Recaptcha: It should be easy to add, and it
even works without JS these days.

Or, what I find works surprisingly well, and is even easier for users,
is a strategy I picked up from pmwiki:

Just add a textbox labeled "To prove you're not a spambot, enter the
word '[any word at all]' here:" Doesn't matter what the word is, and it
doesn't even need to be randomly chosen. Just pick any one word and
stick with it (and verify it of course). Also toss in some auto-updated
IP filtering based on the publicly published and maintained IP
blacklists, and spam should plummet to near-nothing.

Re: Time for a captcha or something on this NG?

Am 14.05.2013 21:52, schrieb Nick Sabalausky:

Is it perhaps time to put some sort of captcha or something on the web
interface for this NG? The signal-to-noise ratio's kinda been getting
dragged down by the spambots.

One possibility would be Recaptcha: It should be easy to add, and it
even works without JS these days.

Or, what I find works surprisingly well, and is even easier for users,
is a strategy I picked up from pmwiki:

Just add a textbox labeled "To prove you're not a spambot, enter the
word '[any word at all]' here:" Doesn't matter what the word is, and it
doesn't even need to be randomly chosen. Just pick any one word and
stick with it (and verify it of course). Also toss in some auto-updated
IP filtering based on the publicly published and maintained IP
blacklists, and spam should plummet to near-nothing.

One thing I wanted to try, which doesn't require any user interaction,
was to make a hidden form field with a random number and check if the
POSTed form contains the right number. I've heard that this can already
be quite effective.

The other thing is a simple word based black list - trivial to do, but I
never got around to do it. Using public IP black lists is yet another
candidate that I always wanted to integrate.

Re: Time for a captcha or something on this NG?

Step one is done: a simple word based black list with around ten words - should handle about 90% of what got through recently.