Your anti-spam measurements are far too extreme here

[Ecru]

Just letting you know, every post I've made until now has taken me at least 10 tries to get the captcha right. It's extremely difficult to read and I had to request the same image over and over again until it finally clicked.

I can understand the difficulty setting as you really don't want bots, but I was ready to just stop posting after the fifth try.

Seems that 10 posts made it so I can post without the captcha, so that's nice. Perhaps make it 3 or 5 posts instead of 10?

[Deaks]

Thank you for posting, 10 posts was agreed as it shows user is active we have had people coming in posting 5 posts of spam but luckily the community is fast at reporting and staff are fast at responding so at this time I cannot see it being lowered but we are always listening to community.

[Irisado]

It's annoying to make it through your first ten posts here, I agree, but I don't think that it can be changed.  A few spammers still make it through the system here as it is without making life easier for them, so I have to say that I back the Staff at SMF leaving the limit unchanged.

Blame the spammers, for it is their actions that have forced this to be implemented in the first place.

[Colin]

I can't agree more. I even remember how difficult it was to guess the capatcha. You know it is bad when humans can't get it right after several attempts. Hopefully in the future there will be a more effective way to deal with bots. I apologize for the difficulty you encountered.

[MrPhil]

As CAPTCHAs have become less and less effective against bots (and more effective against humans!), other methods will have to come to be used. These could include visual puzzles such as clock faces, Q&A, poster behavior (e.g., a whole bunch of posts in a very short time), and post content (looking for spam characteristics such as keywords, capitalization, substitution of numbers and punctuation for letters, etc.).

[kingW3]

Quick idea
A post moderation for first 10 posts until the first 10 posts are approved the posts after 10 posts doesn't show(for example if you post 150 times and your first 10 posts aren't approved none will show),and if approving them is a much of job for the team members you could give it to community helpers with more than 100 posts(i took 10 and 100 posts as an example).Mostly you will find at least 10 team members or smf heroes/super heroes this shouldn't be a much of a problem.
Another one
Disable links in signature and posts for the first few posts completely so if a spam bot links to any link like www. or wwwdot or www(dot) etc it will give them a error You can't post link(s) until xx posts
Still SMF support should be excluded in both cases

[Kindred]

post moderation - no...   WAY too much work, even for community helpers.   Just won't work and will only get new users upset at how long it takes.

Signatures and links *ARE* already disabled for new users.


We can't use "questions" here either...   because we have far too many international/non-english speakers.


basically, there is no good answer...

[青山 素子]

We can't use "questions" here either...   because we have far too many international/non-english speakers.

That's the big problem with this forum. It caters to an international audience. This makes it difficult to simply implement something "friendlier" like question/answer sets as not every member knows a single common language. Fancy picture-based tests, like choosing all the dogs in a mixed set of photos, requires localized instructions for every language you want to support. Traditional CAPTCHA at least has the benefit of being mostly language-neutral. Even if you don't use the alphabet in your native language (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Tawainese, etc.) you will at least have some way of typing the symbols.

[Ricky.]

But still Captcha is in English I guess..  ?

[青山 素子]

But still Captcha is in English I guess..  ?

It's scrambled letters from the Latin/Roman alphabet. Every language that uses those letters can understand the purpose, more or less. Even languages that do not use those letter forms will have some way to input them on a computer because they are used in programming languages and a lot of other software. It's as close as you can get to being language-neutral for a security measure like this.

[Ricky.]

Alright.. thats well explained !

[emanuele]

* emanuele takes a note about multi-language antispam Q&A...it shouldn't even be too difficult I think...they just need a new table, {db_prefix}log_comments is not the best place for that...

[euantorano]

Definitely agreed with the OP. I just signed up and I'll be lucky to make it to five posts thanks to the fact I have to fill in this captcha every single time I do try to post. I had to listen to the audio captcha to be able to make any kind of sense of the last one I got...

[floridaflatlander]

Definitely agreed with the OP. I just signed up and I'll be lucky to make it to five posts thanks to the fact I have to fill in this captcha every single time I do try to post...

It's worth it.

... I'll be lucky to make it to five posts thanks to the fact I have to fill in this captcha every single time I do try to post. I had to listen to the audio captcha to be able to make any kind of sense of the last one I got...

Press ctrl+ to help you read the letters better

ctrl0 to return to regular text.

[Colin]

I have better than 20/15 vision and I still had serious trouble transcribing those characters. It is by no means clear.

[floridaflatlander]

I have better than 20/15 vision and I still had serious trouble transcribing those characters. It is by no means clear.

Odd, mine are pretty bad and I can read them without enlarging them.

[青山 素子]

I have better than 20/15 vision and I still had serious trouble transcribing those characters. It is by no means clear.

Quality of vision isn't really a huge factor when you're looking at distorted letterforms as opposed to small/large stuff.

[MovedGoalPosts]

Cathpas are a pain in the butt to humans, yet seem to be easily read by bots.  So all they deter is the legitimate user, and not those they are supposed to deter.  The one on here, I recall is very hit and miss whether a person can correctly decipher it.

I can understand the difficulty of using verification questions on a multilingual site.  No doubt there are also other various antispam measures being employed by SMF behind the scenes, but when the antispam measure is deterring the legitimate user, some different defence has to be found.

[John Wodden]

I agree with you 

Just letting you know, every post I've made until now has taken me at least 10 tries to get the captcha right. It's extremely difficult to read and I had to request the same image over and over again until it finally clicked.

I can understand the difficulty setting as you really don't want bots, but I was ready to just stop posting after the fifth try.

Seems that 10 posts made it so I can post without the captcha, so that's nice. Perhaps make it 3 or 5 posts instead of 10?

I agree with you

[LiroyvH]

I'm sure *you* would...