I could do with some input, I have a pet hate which is CAPTCHA when a new member registers they see a hazy word which they have to decipher and then type in. I opted not to do that with this forum and went for a rather to simplistic approach by asking a question (2+3=) to catch out the automated spam bots. It seems we are still attracting manual (or maybe automated) spam in the form of new users with links in their profile selling loans, Viagra and God knows what else.... So.. as this is a local forum the questions for the registration should be about local knowledge but also not deter people. The forum allows multiple answers to the same question i.e. what is Wolverhamptons football team: Wolves Wolverhampton Wanderers etc This will hopefully stop the young entrepreneurs from the Far east! If you have any ideas for good questions please PM me, don't post here as that would be counter productive! I can ban IP addresses from suspect countries but I would rather not do that.
Hate those captchas. Some are stupidly difficult to get right as well. How about: Who founded Wolverhampton? -Lady Wulfrun (or variants as below) -Wulfrun -Wulfruna -Lady Wulfruna Many will already know, & if they don't, a quick google search will tell them
You would have messed me right up with the local knowledge thing, as I was born in Stoke On Trent and raised in north and mid staffordshire. lol I find the maths question system works, but you have to mix number, symbols and words, rather than just putting it all in numerals and symbols. Bots can be written to google the answer to 8/4 or 6*9, but they struggle with 8 divided by four, six * 9 and similar. The longer you make it the better, so for example bots really struggle with eight times 2 / 4 for example, it also seems to flumux the poor Chinese sods paid to manually sign up to forums. I use the same method a lot, including on 1 site I sorted for a friend who was getting about 20 spammer sign ups a day. Ade
So far so good, only a few are getting through now. Had to get the ban hammer out on a number of users the other day!
It seems we underestimated them Still far to many creating accounts and spamming dubious links in their profile. I will chanve the questions to a local knowledge type theme I think....
