When the bots attack! [closed]

Answer 1

The following is unfeasible with today's technology, but I don't think it's too far off. It's also probably overkill for dealing with forum spam, but could be useful for account sign-ups, or any situation where you wanted to be really sure you were dealing with humans and they would be prepared for it to take a few minutes to complete the process.

Have 2 users who are trying to prove themselves human connect to each other via their webcams and ask them if the person they are seeing is human and live (i.e. not a recording), by getting them to, for example, mirror each other's movements, or write something on a piece of paper. Get everyone to do this a few times with different users, and throw a few recordings into the mix which they also have to identify correctly as such.

Answer 2

Mollom is supposedly good at stopping spam. Both personal (free) and professional versions are available.

Answer 3

A friend has the simplest anti-spam method, and it works.

He has a custom text box which says "please type in the number 4".

His blog is rather popular, but still not popular enough for bots to figure it out (yet).

Answer 4

I've seen a few neat ideas along the lines of Asira which ask you to identify which pictures are cats. I believe the idea originated from KittenAuth a while ago..

Answer 5

Use something like the google image labeler with appropriately chosen images such that a computer wouldn't be able to recognise the dominant features of it that a human could.

The user would be shown an image and would have to type words associated with it. They would keep being shown images until they have typed enough words that agreed with what previous users had typed for the same image. Some images would be new ones that they weren't being tested against, but were included to record what words are associated with them. Depending on your audience you could also possibly choose images that only they would recognise.

Answer 6

Invisble form fields. Make a form field that doesn't appear on the screen to the user. using display: none as a css style so that it doesn't show up. For accessibility's sake, you could even put hidden text so that people using screen readers would know not to fill it in. Bots almost always fill in all fields, so you could block any post that filled in the invisible field.