I just thought I would let you all know that we’re going to try to install some more safeguards against spammers in the next couple of weeks, as we’ve been getting some pretty bad spam lately, much of which is pornographic.
This could involve the occasional captcha for new users, or having to answer a Java question before you post, or something like that. Rest assured, we’ll try to make as un-annoying as we possibly can. 
Cool.
On a slightly related note, I was thinking, it would be cool to have “code” tags do Java syntax highlighting.
Captcha’s are just a waste of time. Most of them are cracked anyway.
Why not something more in the spirit of Java?
“Name two classes in the java.util.* package.”
1. [ ]
2. [ ]
[ register ]
JGO is way to small for any spammer to hardcode that one…
I know plenty of Java programmers who would find the above question very difficult, and a quiz may deter lots of people who are new to Java from joining the forum.
I heard of a type of captcha where it shows you a picture with lots of different animals in it and you have to say how many of them are cats or dogs or whatever. It was supposedly (at least at the time) unbreakable because of how difficult it is for PCs to automate telling the difference between cats and dogs. You could build something like that.
Yeah, a captcha wouldnt work everywhere but it would work in some places. Combine that with an easy Java or JGO question, and I think it would work pretty well. And yeah, I was trying to cook up a lot of easy Java questions, but then I remembered that all the people who are going to have to be answering these questions (users with very few posts) are rarely going to know the answer to these “easy” Java questions.
So it’s got to be a question that is so easy anybody could do it, and/or the answer appears in a specified topic on JGO that they can browse to. Either way it’s risky because we don’t want to screw new users out of JGO.
One successful option I saw was in a Warcraft III JASS forum (JASS is the scripting language for their maps). It had a picture of a “grunt” unit from the game, and said “what type of unit is this?” Unique photo-based questions (as JL mentioned) are great, but then the problem appears which is that JGO has no recognizable images. I guess maybe we could put a coffee cup image or something, and ask “what drink is this?”
changing the way the standard SMF registration page looks (variable names, different check box combinations) can also do wonders against automatic bot registrations.
How about “What is the name of this website?”, accepting anything which matches “(?i)java\p{Space}*gaming”? Specific enough that bots have to be customised for this site, simple enough that anyone with two brain cells to rub together can get it right.
I think that would be a good idea except this is a question that is fairly commonly used to stop bots, and a bot could just use the dot-com name to get it right (with a space). It’ll certainly be tougher, though, and might do the trick.
We could also just do something like,
What is the name of this animal?
http://icons.iconarchive.com/icons/fixicon/farm/cat-icon.jpg
Everyone should be able to get that.
Check this site out:
http://random.irb.hr/signup.php
Reload a few times. Guess they really don’t want just anybody to come and ask annoying Qs
Kitty?
Well, that is actually a pretty good solution. Easy enough to try.
Yeah, that’s a good idea too. Presumably everyone can do arithmetic.
[quote]Check this site out:
http://random.irb.hr/signup.php
[/quote]
Gosh… d/dx [ Sin (Pi/2) + 5xCos(Pi/2)] etc… Looks like wont be joining that one in a hurry lol.
I haven’t seen it before. I have seen basic arithmetic quite a lot.
The image example is ambiguous. Could be cat, kitten, or Miss Tiddles.
That’s true, you’d also have to say something about needing a 3 letter word or whatever.
I have seen some where there is an image and you write the contents of the image down in a textbox
SO like it would have 2 words, but the words are covered in lines, so a computer could not read them but a human should be able to.
Trying to make a captcha completely robust is largely pointless - the really dedicated spam bots are wired up to a website offering free games/movies/porn and simply re-post your captcha tests to be solved by the next freebie hunting human. There’s no practical way to defend against that.
On the other hand, we’ve got nothing at the moment, so even the most brain dead of spam bots can post. I would suggest adding the quickest, simplest captcha because while it might not be foolproof it’ll stop 99% of bots and the remaining 1% aren’t worth the effort.
why not a small and simple applet game, like a “Frogger” game (or some random easy games, developed by the community 
)?
that should be easy for a human to win, while not easy for a machine - and plus, would be fun to implement and already give the new user a little bit taste of a java game .
And to play a 20-seconds java game should not bother any user interested in, well, java games .
Man, I just got goosebumps! I don’t know how practical it is since it would force a jre install, but I gotta say, I’m in love with that idea. ;D
The taste of a frozen browser, or worse? :-\ It might work with Flash, but please do not force applets upon people, even if this is a Java-forum…
That’s what a captcha is…