Dealing with spammer accounts

wikipedia said:
Circumvention

There are a few approaches to defeating CAPTCHAs: exploiting bugs in the implementation that allow the attacker to completely bypass the CAPTCHA, improving character recognition software, or using cheap human labor to process the tests.

Spammers to me, seem like humans and they aren't trying to fill all the forums with massive amount of spam. They just open one account, send a couple of messages and then disappear.
 
Since we see about 5-10 spammers a month, I don't think it matters if they are filled by humans or not (or am I wrong about 5-10 spammers?)
 
Most spammers here aren't computers, they are actual people simply registering and spamming. You have to type in a verification code, and activate your email before posting.

Are you saying it's not computers because of that verification code?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha#Computer_character_recognition

And concerning humans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha#Human_solvers
I am assuming that the spammers are humans due to the verification/email combination. Yes, several bots can read CAPTCHA, but many can't. Are bots able to activate links via email these days? I'm guessing few can, so few they we don't need to worry about it. I am thinking of implementing reCAPTCHA. I've used it elsewhere and it has worked quite well. With a combination of this, along with a simple question, it should work out. Worse comes to worse is we can manually go through and accept them that way.
 
On some other forums I go on, they use a few questions and ask you to google it to answer it. I suggest using a CAPTCHA questions and it's simple for humans to pluck out some key words and google.
 
I have a reCAPTCHA on my site for comments, and I still get spam comments occasionally.

Granted, the number has dropped dramatically, but still.

I think there should be an auto-ban for users that register with 1 as their WCA ID.
 
I have a reCAPTCHA on my site for comments, and I still get spam comments occasionally.

Granted, the number has dropped dramatically, but still.

I think there should be an auto-ban for users that register with 1 as their WCA ID.

Then they would use 2 or not even put it there.
 
i personally feel that it would be better if there are more admins and moderators.
maybe make one moderator for each category?
the moderators can ensure that people stick to their topic, don't flame each other or break any of the rules
 
Just ask a series of questions related to the rules. Do it in such a way that the user will need to read all the rules before registering. You could ask 10 or so questions, each based on rules presented every 10% of the way through the page.

To keep the questions random, you could come up with a few hundred (some just reworded). And never offer more than "x" amount of questions to a particular IP.

Then again, you can just manually screen them like twisty's :-)

Tim.
 
Doing an auto-ban for people who put 1 for their WCA would probably work. I will look in it.

Asking questions about the rules would be nice, but that means manually reviewing each account. If we are going to manually review every account, why not ask them why they want to join? It would be much easier.

Stefan, I sent you an email with 3 of them.
 
I installed a new little feature. When a user registers, they will have to either type the word 'cube' into a box, or type the number of sides on a Rubik's cube. This should help somewhat.
 
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad: Yeah.... We really need to revive this thread to deal with it.
Asking cubing questions is a must for joining this forum.

Before the spam was harmless and annoying. Now, it's just disgusting. It's so disgusting!!!!!
 
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