[Max Taxable]

Originally Posted by kh99

There's one problem with that - no doubt it would be trivial to program a bot to get past it, so if it were a standard feature it would most likely be useless.

FWIW at my site we use question and answer human verification and that Spam-O-Matic thing that looks up info at stopforumspam.com (and submits to it if you want), and between them they stop hundreds a day. We end up getting 5-10 registrations per day and I'm pretty certain those are actual humans. Anyway, I have no idea how it would compare to the one Max Taxable linked to - maybe we'll try that one out some day.

The whole point of using bots is speed. Therefore the botnet admins never going to adjust bots to make them take their time registering. This is if they ever figure out time is the issue.

I use the Q&A verify as well, but with a twist - the answer is identical to the very LONG question, which is instructions to copy and paste the question into the answer box!

I definitely agree a mufti-tiered system is best. There's no magic bullet - but there's sure some good ones!

Originally Posted by nhawk

That works

But, I don't even want to waste the PHP processing power to give them a reason. They aren't worth a nanosecond of PHP time to me. Let the server itself and firewall handle them and hang their system waiting for a reply from my server until their end times out with an error that the web site can't be found.

To date.. zero spam on my site. (now watch me get hammered)

For many people though, a handy-dandy ready-made xml product file is near the ceiling of their abilities!