Spam out of control: Q&A ineffective

[kh99]

Originally Posted by Panzer Max

... Yeah, it must be human, or there's something really wrong with the Q&A sceme. I worry that, because the answer of the Q&A is in the vB options, there's some way that a bot can find the answer and supply it to the Q&A. Has anyone checked that? ....

I was wondering the same thing one day. We get maybe 5-10 spammer registrations a day and I was wondering if they were human. I wrote some code to log questions shown and answers guessed. I only ran it for 1 day, but I found that there were a lot of "aborted" registrations, i.e. started to register but never offered any answer to the question, so I guess that those were bots that couldn't handle q/a. But the ones that did answer didn't do anything like entering a lot of guesses, they normally got it in one (and our questions don't have the answer as part of the question at all). There were also a few wrong answers like you'd expect from a human. In any case, I didn't see any signs of q/a being bypassed or guessed via brute force.

I also wondered about the possiblilty of a human finding the answer and somehow recording it for bots to use, but I find that changing the questions makes no difference to the number of registrations we get, and one time we got a few registartions right after I changed them.