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Hardest forum to register for?

by kindsvater
5 replies
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If the WF wants to weed out some spam bots it could take a lesson from this forum with its 8 different questions to register:

Registration Agreement

(click the I accept the terms of the agreement to see the long list of questions, all of which require typed entries and maybe a bit of research)

It must work. A forum for one narrow product type has over 70,000 posts and they're really good. Who knew?

Though the "hardest" sites may be those with scrunched up pictures of letters I can never read. Sometimes I just give up.

.
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by kindsvater View Post

    If the WF wants to weed out some spam bots it could take a lesson from this forum with its 8 different questions to register:

    Registration Agreement

    (click the I accept the terms of the agreement to see the long list of questions, all of which require typed entries and maybe a bit of research)

    It must work. A forum for one narrow product type has over 70,000 posts and they're really good. Who knew?

    Though the "hardest" sites may be those with scrunched up pictures of letters I can never read. Sometimes I just give up.

    .
    They don't care about any of that.

    Have a look at the SEO forum, it's a spamfest free for all.
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  • Profile picture of the author seasoned
    Originally Posted by kindsvater View Post

    If the WF wants to weed out some spam bots it could take a lesson from this forum with its 8 different questions to register:

    Registration Agreement

    (click the I accept the terms of the agreement to see the long list of questions, all of which require typed entries and maybe a bit of research)

    It must work. A forum for one narrow product type has over 70,000 posts and they're really good. Who knew?

    Though the "hardest" sites may be those with scrunched up pictures of letters I can never read. Sometimes I just give up.

    .
    WOW, WHY do they even have the "captcha"? The dinosaur names are likely good enough! They probably have a lot of young kids, and it IS a tight focus. Outside of talks about fraud in palentology, and favorite dinosaur, or which were real, I don't imagine they have many bad fights.

    Steve
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    • Profile picture of the author AprilCT
      Originally Posted by seasoned View Post

      WOW, WHY do they even have the "captcha"? The dinosaur names are likely good enough! They probably have a lot of young kids, and it IS a tight focus. Outside of talks about fraud in palentology, and favorite dinosaur, or which were real, I don't imagine they have many bad fights.

      Steve
      I don't think it is about fights among the members. More likely, they just want to keep out the spam posters.
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      • Profile picture of the author seasoned
        Originally Posted by AprilCT View Post

        I don't think it is about fights among the members. More likely, they just want to keep out the spam posters.
        Just saying....

        Steve
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  • Profile picture of the author HN
    Banned
    You are kidding. It only takes a few minutes to write an algorithm to break into this site.
    The letters in that "captcha" are easily recognized by online OCR.
    The missing letters in the words can be automatically looked up in the dictionary by the bot (if you have a database), ironically the underscore is used in SQL to match any single character.
    SQL pattern matching enables you to use “_” to match any single character and “%” to match an arbitrary number of characters (including zero characters).

    ... alternatively the bot can send a query to Google to fill in the blanks. Search Google for "St_gosaurus" and parse the word after the phrase "Showing results for". That would be "Stegosaurus"

    I would say 5-6 minutes of work.

    It is possible, however, to keep the spammers away, but those sign up forms would require video, flash, javascript, mouse activity, time sensitive activity. Eg, type in the captcha at the speed of 1.32 +-.32 chars per second and read the input by javascript. It's possible to break this as well, but it will keep the dumb ones away for quite some time.
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