The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

JohnTHaller wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2018 9:33 am The only things that seem to work today are distributed blacklists and content analysis. You won't keep spambots out now because they farm out captchas to real humans. Keep a basic captcha like Google's ReCaptcha for account signups just to keep out the lowest automated ones, but don't worry beyond that.

Thanks John. All duly noted.

sorry for the noobish slightly related comment.

antibots (google recaptchas anyone?) are getting far more annoying recently. just registering on this site made me go through 2 mark all squares that are sign/vehicles a few times, and select all cars at least 20 times on 1 square. having regularly use a portable vpn from time to time, ive never been hit with a recaptcha, which strikes me as odd.

Here's my account creation feedback. Most new sign-ups will not tolerate what I just dealt with. Going to NEW USERS PLEASE READ! is showing "Latest anti-spam Q&A" by Andrew Lee, followed by a reply by kenkang and another set of answers. Well, clearly, this is clear as mud, and I was going to have try all four answers to the respective questions. I did. Three times over, as I recall - circa 12 different answers over time. Finally an answer was accepted. Though like many I despise them with a passion, I'd rather do hydrants or traffic lights because I know there is hope at the end of that tunnel. I was going to quit, give up and go home after two full text answer iterations but, for some unknown reason, I persisted.

@qj3328: I feel your pain. But I think your effort will be duly rewarded by amazing low levels of SPAM. Welcome to our forums.

qj3328 wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2019 11:25 am Here's my account creation feedback

Thanks, I'll take another look at our account creation. After periods where I'd spend hours a week on whack-a-spammer, we've had a nice period of relative quiet, but it's certainly possible we've made it too cumbersome.

webfork wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2019 5:41 am Thanks, I'll take another look at our account creation.

Update here: I retested the account creation process and didn't have any issues but I've brought the topic up with the admin to see if something isn't configured correctly.

qj3328 wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2019 11:25 am Here's my account creation feedback. Most new sign-ups will not tolerate what I just dealt with.

i agree with this - how many potential sign-ups are we losing?

also, welcome to the board qj3328

How many of those "potential sign-ups" would be spambots or such though?

Would you prefer to "tolerate" nonsense replies to threads or ads or whatever?

Moderators volunteer their time/effort to this site so why should they have to spend more time on whacking spammers?

I have no problem with a registration process that takes a few minutes and saves far more time for the mods.

thepiney wrote: ↑Mon Oct 28, 2019 3:08 am Moderators volunteer their time/effort to this site so why should they have to spend more time on whacking spammers?

I have no problem with a registration process that takes a few minutes and saves far more time for the mods.

Thanks for the support but really it's part of the job of being a moderator, and some spammers will always get through. I don't think we'll ever get to zero. I can say in my early days as moderator we spent a LOT of time smashing spammers and I definitely don't want to back to that. It's a balance.

Thanks to Midas, webfork, bitcoin and thepiney for responses to my comments on the sign-up adventure. I wish I could have been more specific about the circles I went through because it seemed that correct answers were being rejected repeatedly. No matter, as admin on a couple of forums I fully appreciate whack-a-spammer efforts, and thank you for that.

qj3328 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 30, 2019 8:06 pm I wish I could have been more specific about the circles I went through because it seemed that correct answers were being rejected repeatedly. No matter, as admin on a couple of forums I fully appreciate whack-a-spammer efforts, and thank you for that.

Not to worry -- our site admin has been very good over the years about coming up with new and better ways of doing things. It's one of the things that's kept me going on this project. So whatever we have right now for an anti-spam system, it might be very different in 6 months.

Thanks again for the input.

Just to improve things a bit, I have made the "New User" topic one single post only, with the Q&A section right on top, and a little explanation of why the answers are random. That topic has now been locked, so it will forever contain only one post, which should be less intimidating to new comers reading it.

I have moved the other replies to a separate topic where we can continue our discussion of how to refine the anti-bot algorithm in the future.

Good move. Let's see if newcomers find it less daunting that way...

Midas wrote: ↑Fri Nov 08, 2019 4:00 am Good move. Let's see if newcomers find it less daunting that way...

Agreed, thanks