Today I was emailing one of my online acquaintances and I decided to invite him to join us here on AnyCPU.org. I wanted to put a link in the email, so I went to the signup page. What a shock!

IMO this anti spam quiz could be a LOT easier and friendlier, and still do the job of denying access by bots.

cheers,
Jeff

I agree. I recall discussing this, and I know Dajgoro made things better. So, you are looking at the improved version!

Now we have (I think) three moderators, we could surely rework this - but it's Dajgoro's call of course.

Ed

Ok, I'll put on my todo list to fix that since now we have moderators to ban the spammers.

I seem to remember going through that to join, and I didn't find it to be offensively difficult ... in fact, I thought that it was rather clever. Have any bots figured it out yet, and have any humans found the 4th-grade math to be prohibitively complex? JMO ...

Mike B.

The problem is we would never know how many humans shrugged and walked away. I've certainly done that before.

Well, I don't know.. but I find the algebra infinitely more friendly than captchas, which I always have to redo again and again until it finally accept it - and I don't have the faintest idea as to what's right or wrong with either of them. I'm much more likely to walk way from that kind of hurdle.

-Tor

The worst captchas are awful. But the most recent recaptcha is very good: the difficulty of the captcha is adjusted according to other signals. So most of us, most of the time, get an easy one. See here.

Ed, I took a look at that link, and those are exactly the ones I really hate. I can't read them, I keep hitting the 'refresh' again and again until I think I can recognise something, then try again when it fails.
What's wrong with the algebra, anyway? I think it's brilliant. Shouldn't be any problem for the real audience.

-Tor

Please look again, I think you may have missed the point of their update.

Ah, sorry, you're correct. Scrolling down a bit..
I have used those too, and obviously I can figure them out. But I don't see them as better, or even faster, than the algebra..
Algebra doesn't have to be made complex. Or maybe sometimes it does - as a moderator on a couple of other forums I have become absolutely certain that there are not only spambots out there, there are also huge numbers of people working as human spambots, they go to work in the morning, sitting in some internet cafe or something, and manually spam and spam again. I've monitored them live, they're humans. That's why some forums use questions that only the intended audience would know, the problem with that is that is has to be updated regularly because as soon as a spammer has it figured out, the right answer is getting distributed to the others.

-Tor

Indeed, spam is a business, and it's populated both by people and by robots. And I suspect some of the robots can use google. On the other hand, the signup form is only a first line of defence, and we're probably pretty low profile at present. Either a simple arithmetic or a simple cpu-related question would cut out some of the bad actors, and whatever we do we'll need (and have) moderator attention for whatever is left. There's also scope for some automation on our side, but it may not be worth the hassle of setting up.

With Dajgoro's permission, I've updated the signup process. We now have more moderator attention so we can react if we see spammy posts.

As a user, please use the 'flag' feature if you see an objectionable post. Or send a PM to a moderator. Please don't start a public discussion on the questionable post.

Cheers
Ed