RRC Archives

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam
Spam!

I'm working on a solution. The captchas put on registration aren't doing a good job. I'm tired of deleting posts every morning and night and I'm sure everybody is tired of seeing them.

What about a question they have to answer such as "Fill in the Blank - Red River _________"

Picture identification works well to stop those things. For example, a 3x3 grid of pictures with the task of selecting only the cats. In this case you could make it climbing-specific so that it's highly unlikely that anyone will spend the time to write a bot to break it. Select the pictures of passive protection, or select the pictures that contain nylon.

Saxman wrote:What about a question they have to answer such as "Fill in the Blank - Red River _________"

Because I would fail by putting in Outdoors. I climb in the Red or the Gorge, but Red River is always, always followed by Outdoors.

Ruckus?

Something I use on another forum to keep spam bots out is to ask them a question that only people who know the culture could answer.

So for this forum, could ask questions like this:

"What 4 letter word describes traditional climbing while placing your own gear?" trad
"What is harder, a 5.11b, or a 5.12a?" 5.12a
"What's the 4 letter word to tell your belayer he needs to pull the rope tight? - take

Unless they specifically target this site, they won't be able to get around that. You could just create about 20-30 questions. Avoid mutliple choice, make them actually type in the answer.

I heard a report on the radio a month or two ago about a company in India who catalogs screen scrapes that have captcha on them and then a human sits and enters the codes. Then, their automated software can use that catalog to move past the captcha if it finds a match. They get something like 3 cents per entry. Some of them were doing like 15 a minute.

bcombs wrote:I heard a report on the radio a month or two ago about a company in India who catalogs screen scrapes that have captcha on them and then a human sits and enters the codes. Then, their automated software can use that catalog to move past the captcha if it finds a match. They get something like 3 cents per entry. Some of them were doing like 15 a minute.

wow