Would this stop spam?
 

Hypothetical, and I'm wondering if I should post the idea in the 'Modifications Requested' forums.

1. A captch that asks the visitor to enter the colours of each letter rather than the value. Bots think it's a normal captcha and enter the value.

this would be good, but you need to be sure the colors are standard because a lot of people will not see the proper colors on old screens

It would definitely suck for me since I am color blind.

It would be better if the colours were standard, but the words you had to type in the colour of would say a totally different colour to the colour they actually were.

As in, the text in the image would be 'Red green blue'

And the colours of the words would be 'Blue red green' or something. Bots would then think it was a captcha and try to answer it.

As the other poster noted, you'd completely screw over anyone who was color blind.

Just because i am color blind, does not give you the right to call me "other" lol ;)

We get alot of spammers. Our spam filters are such that they have to list the state they are from. The first state we have listes is aspam - if we see people in the system with that state, we purge them.

Then we moderate the first post. Catch a lot of spammers that way too, so the garbage never hits the board.

We also had some of the privs set so that they can't post and such if they haven't activated their account through the email, but AOL had our emails blocked as spam so we were having to manually set those folks by hand - a total PITA. But the state code and the moderated first post help before people can post their crap on the site.

The other thing is that we don't let them have PM access until they've been a member a few days AND have posted to the general board several times. That way, they can't hit our members through the PMs.

Ok I'll go with 'that guy' next time :p ;)

I'd start looking into implementing reCAPTCHA. Either that, or KittenAuth. However, reCAPTCHA has the added benefit of actually helping to digitize books.

* Edit: Taking my own advice, I went ahead and did a little reading up on the reCAPTCHA API. Suprisingly, I've gotten it working with relative ease thus replacing the default CAPTCHA on registration. Expect a release soon.