I am getting a number of spambots registering on my bbPress at http://www.fcgottawa.ca/forum/ I would like to try having an image verification captcha that registrants have to enter in order to register. I searched this forum and didn’t see anybody talking about this – does this exist? It’s a standard part of many other forum packages. Is there a plugin for this functionality?

Thanks for your suggestions.

[@fel64 Member 17 years, 4 months ago]

Doesn’t exist as far as I know. Build your own. (By the way, some people simply use something like instructing users to type something particular in an extra field to make sure that it’s a human reading the web page. That may be sufficient and far easier.)

[@baptiste Member 17 years, 4 months ago]

My favorite Captcha by far:

http://www.kessels.com/captcha/

May send your users into convulsions – but it’s hard as heck for bots to read! I used it for a phpBB forum I ran and users always managed to register – but stopped the bots cold.

[@prowsej Member 17 years, 4 months ago]

Thanks for the responses.

[@alexhertz Member 17 years ago]

Captcha won’t help. All spam software is trained for captchas. If all bbpress forum would use the same captcha, spammers will quickly adapt. Email verification is also useless: every decent spam package allows for confirmation of mail links.

Try more of Turing test. One option is a two-level confirmation: a mail link AND after it is clicked – a captcha. Something new that spam software doesn’t expect.

Or send an email with password and OPT-OUT (rather than confirmation) link. Automated software will click the link, and opt out of the forum.

Or send email verification with text to be typed into url window rather than a link.

Or, send confirmation email which must be confirmed by reply-to rather then clicking a link. Still better, reply-to and type something in the subject line.