Need a challenge question that a visitor may know, to keep off spam

[bluehash 1,581]

Could you guys suggest challenge questions for the registration stage. Something that a beginner may know, but not a spammer. The spam blocker has blocked 156 registrations in 12 hours(There is a counter at the bottom of the index page), so they are rampant.

[jsolarski 94]

i would suggest something off the launchpad site, or what is included in the box. maybe a register name for one of the base chips, or settings.

 

just some ideas

[bluehash 1,581]

Thanks Jsolarski,

I got one.. Who makes MSP430 micro-controllers?

[gordon 229]

... and make an array of three radio buttons to choose from: Microchip, Atmel, Renesas.

 

Those who complain, pass.

 

[bluehash 1,581]

Hahaha.. good one. No radio button support though at reg.

[SirZusa 34]

What about these standard things?

* is there no AKISMET-Plugin available?

* normal graphical captcha

* a small calculation (1 + 2 = ?, 4 * 3 = ?)

* Colors (Which color has the water, grass, blood, beer, sky, ... )

* Pictures (show 4 pictures and tell the user to select for example "the apple" out of this set)

* a simple task for the user ... something like that: http://webdesignledger.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/currybet.jpg

[zeke 693]

I have had excellent success with the last suggestion SirZusa made above.

[bluehash 1,581]

They are passing all the tests.. even questions like "who manufactures MSP430 chips" or "how many bits in a byte".

[Philipp 56]

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+bits+in+a+byte

 

this could be a problem

[cde 334]

Is it a random generated question, or is it just the static ones you choose?

No captcha? Like the picture/jigsaw ones? You could use the image of a launchpad even.

[bluehash 1,581]

Random from a set of Qs.

Captcha is enabled.

[zeke 693]

That wolfram alpha site sorta kills off all the clever questions that I can come up with.

 

Here is an example question that I threw at it and it answered it just fine.

[zeke 693]

I know something that might work.

 

As a question that requires a response from an approved list of responses.

 

For example, refresh this question and see the different responses it gives you: "who's on first?"

[SirZusa 34]

hmm... seems like the bots got intelligent over the last years ...

 

* another try would be to use the questions - but don't render them as text - provide them as an image - i know many bots use text-recognition but you may confuse them a bit

 

* to make it even more complicated: give out a fake-question in plain text and lets have it the same color or hide it so the user won't see it ... then give out the correct question you want the user to answer in an image and give it a class, name, alt, title that doesn't allow the bot to conclude it is used as something lika a "captcha"

 

* maybe a verification by an SMS would be possible - but this could be too expensive over time

[tonesenna 20]

Are the bots decoding/guessing captchas?

A good question would be one that requires some kind of logic from the user which can't be performed by a machine/script.

In practice, though it's not easy to come up with something, specially something that fits into the tools that ipboard provides.

One example, would be to select, from a set of objects, the one that doesn't match. The mismatch may be due to colour, number of sides of a polygon, mounting type of a IC package (SMD/TH), type of memory (volatile, non-volatile), prime vs non-prime number, integral power of two vs non integral power, type of object (animal vs fruit), etc etc.

 

Is this possible to do in ip board? Anything that involves a pool of questions, randomly selected at each test is easilly circumvented by a bot. The ideal would be to have a database of objects that are qualified by a number of properties and on each test, choose a set of objects that would serve such test.

 

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