geekhack

geekhack Community => Off Topic => Topic started by: kipawazi on Fri, 21 August 2020, 10:34:31

Title: PM a member
Post by: kipawazi on Fri, 21 August 2020, 10:34:31
Seriously?
I feel like I'm being told to go **** myself.

The captcha is unreadable and the second response... I tested cherry, cherrymx, cherrymx, linear, tactil, tactile and... NO.
All captcha is the same, and the listen to letter doesn't works without download the sample and the audio quality is horrible for a non native english...
Very nice.
What is the next step?

Very thanks.

EDIT: Sorry for my aggressiveness
Title: Re: PM a member
Post by: jamster on Fri, 21 August 2020, 12:17:27
I suspect you're overthinking the question. Mechanical?
Title: Re: PM a member
Post by: kipawazi on Fri, 21 August 2020, 12:54:49
Mdr, nice idea but no it's not good...
It makes no sense... It's absurd.

But I need send a PM... My life is ****.

EDIT: The answer is "mx", thanks reddit. It's ridiculous.
Title: Re: PM a member
Post by: HoffmanMyster on Mon, 24 August 2020, 10:54:41
I was worried the increased anti-spam measures might cause some issues... :( Very sorry about that. I'll work on cleaning up the verification questions to make it more clear to a human.

For reference, with the old method of anti-spam verification, there was basically nothing stopping spambots from coming through to the site. The mod team has been fighting spammers for the past year or so, until finally making the decision to increase the anti-spam measures you encountered. Unfortunately we don't have a lot of options when it comes to captcha (I don't like the current version either, but I did pass the couple tests I took before committing to the change).

As for the verification questions, if anyone has any clever ideas for alternate questions, please PM me. We definitely need more (and better!) questions.
Title: Re: PM a member
Post by: ddrfraser1 on Mon, 24 August 2020, 11:14:07
Perhaps keep the questions the same but have multiple correct answer to account for subtle differences?
Title: Re: PM a member
Post by: HoffmanMyster on Mon, 24 August 2020, 14:24:51
Perhaps keep the questions the same but have multiple correct answer to account for subtle differences?

Unfortunately there is no option to allow a variety of answers to a given question.  :|  For now I have modified the question to include the number of characters in the answer, which I think will go a long way to helping guide users to the correct answer.
Title: Re: PM a member
Post by: fanpeople on Mon, 24 August 2020, 20:56:35
..... how big is fanpeople's ****?

More
not very
Title: Re: PM a member
Post by: Leslieann on Mon, 24 August 2020, 22:10:05
For reference, with the old method of anti-spam verification, there was basically nothing stopping spambots from coming through to the site. The mod team has been fighting spammers for the past year or so, until finally making the decision to increase the anti-spam measures you encountered. Unfortunately we don't have a lot of options when it comes to captcha (I don't like the current version either, but I did pass the couple tests I took before committing to the change).
Captcha is too easily broken by bots, they're better at it than humans.
Same for those identify the cars or crosswalk, there's limited images, so once it knows them, it knows them.

I had this issue on the forums I run, best thing I ever found was a derivative of this:
https://www.stopforumspam.com/

It all but stopped everything on it's own without any user interaction.
One thing to note, once installed you need to also run it against the user base to remove any already in the system as spammers will create many accounts and never use them or come back months later to use them.
Title: Re: PM a member
Post by: HoffmanMyster on Mon, 24 August 2020, 23:07:38
For reference, with the old method of anti-spam verification, there was basically nothing stopping spambots from coming through to the site. The mod team has been fighting spammers for the past year or so, until finally making the decision to increase the anti-spam measures you encountered. Unfortunately we don't have a lot of options when it comes to captcha (I don't like the current version either, but I did pass the couple tests I took before committing to the change).
Captcha is too easily broken by bots, they're better at it than humans.
Same for those identify the cars or crosswalk, there's limited images, so once it knows them, it knows them.

I had this issue on the forums I run, best thing I ever found was a derivative of this:
https://www.stopforumspam.com/

It all but stopped everything on it's own without any user interaction.
One thing to note, once installed you need to also run it against the user base to remove any already in the system as spammers will create many accounts and never use them or come back months later to use them.

Thank you for this, I’ll look into it! Considering the ineffectiveness of captcha, I have reverted the captcha change - should be much easier for humans to get through that now, my apologies for the poor move there. In addition to the resources linked above, it seems adding more questions will be the best way to combat spammers, so I’d still love to hear some new options if anyone has any. :)