Custom Captchas

I won't go into a lot of detail here, because I discussed it before. In response to a flurry of what appeared to be automatic spam accounts here (I was deleting a dozen a day, and banning others), I started using a custom CAPTCHA system, in which I write the questions that will be used, along with acceptable responses, to replace the one where you were asked interpret a series of fuzzy numbers and letters.

The problem with the old CAPTCHA system is that, for one thing, some people (me included) have trouble reading the darned things, and even when I am certain I have them right, I am still sometimes told that I was wrong. The bigger problem, though, is that these CAPTCHAs are used by thousands of forums and other sites that require a login, and although there are a lot of them, eventually, the spammers add them to their system.

That's less likely with a custom CAPTCHA because, since this is the only site using these questions, it's unlikely that anyone is going to add it to a database, and I can change the questions as often as I want.

Right now, I have about ten questions in the test bank, so the forum will choose one at random whenever someone attempts to create a new account. The questions are simple, so any human spammer who wants to get through it should have no problem, but human spammers are more easily dealt with.

I thought you might enjoy adding more questions to the question bank. The questions should be fairly short, and, more importantly, the accepted answers should be brief and limited.

For example, for the question...

Two plus 3 equals...

I would have to enter at least four acceptable responses, such as ...

5
5.
five
five.

I don't plan on having a lot of math questions, but I like to mix the word (two) and the numerical (3) because there are some standard CAPTCHAs that use math questions. For the same reason, I might alternate between using the equal sign (=) or the word (equals), as well as sometimes using something like "the sum of."

I am looking for questions with simple, fairly straightforward answers, ones that most people will either know or that they can easily look up.

For example, I might ask...

The capital of the US state of Maine is...

It's easy enough for someone to look it up if they don't know that the capital of Maine is Augusta. Acceptable answers might be...

Augusta
Augusta.
Maine?
Beats the hell out of me.

It's unlikely that anyone will choose the the third or fourth responses, but it amuses me, and anyone who did use it would surely be surprised to find that it was an acceptable answer.

In some cases, I might include common misspellings as correct answers, but I don't want to dumb it down too much. I am also trying not to be too US-centric, so I will include some questions from Australia, Canada, England, or other English-speaking countries. Do they speak English in England? In the event that a correct answer would include a word that is spelled differently in the United States as it would be in England, I would want to include both as correct answers.

So anyhow, if it would entertain you to write some of these for the test bank, have at it. Otherwise, I will simply add a few every now and then.

Keep them simple. I don't want to frustrate someone who wants to join the forum.

 

I don't want to have to keep track of who wins or loses future elections.