Great brainiac questions for registration - congratulations!

[webfork]

I really think uwotm8 deserves to be given some leeway here ... Let's not shoot the messenger for being snarky.

I think it's a non-issue because the function complained about has been in place for years without complaint. It's also worked beautifully against spammers. Snarky's one thing but a good troll brings up a non-issue and asks it in a jerk way.

[uwotm8]

The problem is these questions are easy to answer for an actual human being. For an idea of what's going on, read this article:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ind ... g-economy/

Thanks for the link. I hadn't have any idea of it at all.

We have tried CAPTCHA before (included with phpBB) and it didn't work. We tried custom Q&A (color of snow, what comes after 2,4,6 etc.) and they didn't work. The method that works so far is the current one.

Hmmm, may be it also works so far to prevent new users to register. Do you have a statistic / log how many people try to register and give up?
So that sounds like as if all of the other forums have a lot of spam, because the most of them - according to my experience - use the "usual" spam prevention.

Imagine you are a worker on a CAPTCHA solving farm. These CAPTCHA gets forwarded to you on a web browser. Three items (cars, houses), which one is red, 1 second. 3 persons (which one is the male), 1 second. Who is the first president of United States, google, first Wikipedia entry, 5 seconds. Who is the founder of TPFC. WTF is TPFC? Skip. These workers go for going for volume. They are not going to waste time on a single riddle.

Yes, that sounds very plausible.

But for a real human being who is signing up with TPFC, the answer can be found right at the bottom of the TPFC homepage. It would take a couple of seconds of digging, but because the context is available, the problem becomes less difficult.

Hmmm, I am wondering how could an anti-braniac know that "the answer can be found right at the bottom of the TPFC homepage". And I am wondering why should a small brained person search there...or somewhere else in the Internet...and at that bottom obviously is displayed the cool founder of TPFC is...whoever...and TPFC...well known...the acronym for...portablefreeware.com...right, TPFC, that's easy...the same letters...

If there are other suggestions that will resolve this conundrum, I am willing to give it a go. But do realize that we are up against another human being, not a bot. So any proposed solution will quite likely require making a human being do some non-trivial work, which is bound to irritate some people.

Unfortunately I do not have any idea (of anything). Does an Indian key presser see the registration page like a "usual" user does?

[Andrew Lee]

Unfortunately I do not have any idea (of anything). Does an Indian key presser see the registration page like a "usual" user does?

I don't think so. From my understanding, the real work is done by the bots. The humans are merely cheap riddle solvers for stuff that the bots can't handle, so they probably only see the CAPTCHA.

Broadly speaking, sounds like the future of humanity if you ask me.

[Midas]

Just for thoroughness, don't believe all captcha serial solvers are Indian. Check this counter-example among several: http://www.9kw.eu/...

Also, there really is a diverse offer for captcha systems -- here's a few:

• Captcha Bank (http://wordpress.org/plugins/captcha-bank/)
  Confident Captcha (http://wordpress.org/plugins/confident-captcha/)
  FunCaptcha (http://wordpress.org/plugins/funcaptcha/)
  SweetCaptcha (http://wordpress.org/plugins/sweetcaptc ... a-service/)
  SiCaptcha (http://wordpress.org/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/)