would you rather it be a captcha thingy? that could be enabled also :)

yes its pretty annoying the math questions, especially if it isnt working (like your telling here)...

Another possibility is that somebody manually put that advertisement in the comment box after answering the question.

The captcha would not always work, as i witnessed myself after a desperate try to post a comment a while back while the spambot was still active. So this little math system the cubeengine forums use is also applied here just in case. It's not asking anything hard anyway, its simple math.

Most spammers just look for open systems like Quadropolis had, where all you had to do was register and post. Merely adding this challenge stops most of them, as they'd have to tailor their program to respond to this challenge, which is way too much effort for just one site. Spammers make their money on volume. ;)

That said, any chance this challenge could be skipped for, say, accounts older than one week (and maybe have active posts)? I know I find it annoying. (At least it could be moved to below the comment box, where it would be more logically placed...)

i like these math questions because they beware us of the spammers quadropolis invaded 2 weeks ago.
Maybe some guys find this annoying , but you just have to put a little number into a line.
In my opinion it´s okay.

I find the math question funny when you don't forget :P
"Bot can parse the question and do the math". May we invalide that ? (eg, replacing + by a "plus")

I think a math question embedded in a captcha image sort of thing would work very well.. it'd even weed out stupid people who want to type the question instead of the answer

What about asking questions like:
Q: "What relation is your uncle's son?"
A: "Cousin"

Those are much harder to write an automated script for, although there are a limited number of questions of that sort.

Yeah a time period during which captchas appear for new users is a good plan.

Then to really throw them off, the captcha appearances interval could be randomized.
If a randomizer were used to figure out whether a captcha will be required for the next post that boolean should be stored in the users account data (better than doing the randomized captcha at post time so, they can't just try posting on another thread to get around it).

But randomizing it's appearance time isn't necessary if the captcha is good enough the bot can't figure it out.

Bots can read Captcha with OCR.
If the Captcha is very hard, they won't use a bot. They can hire pepole.. :S

0.0

20 posts in 2 days :)