So, I've lightened up the anti-spam checks again. There's no longer a CAPTCHA; there's still a requirement of answering one Lemmings-related security question.
There's no change to *when* users will be prompted to pass a check, which is:
- when registering an account
- when making their first post
- when sending a private message, if they haven't made any posts yet
To other admins: In the event that spam suddenly starts happening, please re-enable the CAPTCHA immediately. It's under Admin Panel > Configuration > Security & Moderation > Anti-Spam.
Why can't we just use CAPTCHA? I don't see why people should need to know any Lemmings-related trivia to sign up. I was reeled into the forum by Lix, not Lemmings, though I did play Lemmings a long time ago. I can imagine there might be users who would be interested only in some of the more tangential topics, and not care about Lemmings in the slightest. Sometimes users bring in their friends for Family Feud, for example, and they might not know anything about Lemmings at all.
Asking Lemmings trivia is just irritating, and those sorts of security questions always struck me as unprofessional anyway. On the other hand, CAPTCHA is expected and common to most forums.
if there's going to be a CAPTCHA, make sure it's an easy one, and not one of those really long and irritating ones where I keep having guess what the hell the word is and get it wrong. >:(
It won't affect you anyway, since you've already registered and have made a post. :P
But, my main logic is - a spambot is more likely to know how to defeat a CAPTCHA (especially one that isn't annoyingly difficult for even an actual human) than to know the answer to Lemmings-related questions. Any spambot capable of googling the answers, probably has bigger plans in mind than a forum with an active userbase in the lowish double-digits.
Quote from: namida on July 27, 2015, 09:03:01 PM
But, my main logic is - a spambot is more likely to know how to defeat a CAPTCHA (especially one that isn't annoyingly difficult for even an actual human) than to know the answer to Lemmings-related questions.
It could be a question that wouldn't even require googling. Like, "what is the name of forum." Even that would be too hard for most spambots.
Sure, we should be as open and inclusive as possible. But let's not kid ourselves, when the name of the forum is still Lemmings Forums at the moment, users who only know Lix and are willfully ignorant of the most basic "trivia" of Lemmings (like the name of a skill, oooh what obscure trivia) are arguably not the target audience. ;P
But anyway, NaOH's idea of questions which effectively require understanding of "context" is probably a good idea in terms of confusing spambots without confusing legitimate human users, it may be worth looking into at least as an experiment of sorts. Now of course, past history of spam also suggests in some cases, it might well be an actual human that did the registration, for which the suggested method would be completely useless.
I've replaced them with some that relate to the board itself and can be quickly found by any human trying to register. If there's no issues, I'll leave them like this.
The three possible questions all take the form as "Please enter the name of the <x>th Lemmings-related project board" (in the order they're displayed on the main board listing). This would mean even people who don't know (and don't have time / effort to look up) the basic Lemmings-related trivia should be able to register.
So, a spambot occurred about 40 minutes ago. Said spambot is now banned. If this remains a one-off, I'll leave the checks as-is, but if we start getting more of them I'll have to tighten them up again.