On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 7:06 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <[email protected]> wrote: > Nikola Smolenski, 08/01/2013 13:10: > >>> In general, as far as we know captchas are currently not stopping >>> spammers at all, while effectively stopping many legitimate (less >> >> >> Care to elaborate? Do we know how are spammers avoiding captchas (by >> software or by humans)? How come other websites don't have this problem? > > > Are you kidding? All MediaWiki websites suffer from the uselessness of its > captchas. > For additional information please refer to the discussions linked from > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/CAPTCHA and others on > wikitech-l.
It's the worst kept secret in the world that you can hire people to decode your captchas -- http://decaptcha.biz/ for example. Better captchas don't work because you are competing against people and if people can't solve the captcha ... In my experience, some sort of easy captchas do prevent the lowest/stupidest level of spammer (you have to have enough knowledge to integrate an api into your spamming program) Also for major spammers, it's so easy to get a large block of phone numbers in the US (a DID) - but again that does raise the bar a second time for spammers. In my opinion a phone auth may also be raising the bar too high for some users, and you have to balance that risk. I think that technical solutions may be a better call for this (some sort of spam ranking system) > > Nemo > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- Leslie Carr Wikimedia Foundation AS 14907, 43821 http://as14907.peeringdb.com/ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
