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Comment by 12907835202 | Hacker News Reader

For my forum with 500k users a month I just added a registration captcha related to my niche. E.g. for a Dark Souls forum it would say "what game is this forum about?" And if you got it wrong the validation would include "tip it's just two words Drk S*ls". This reduced spam by over 99% and didn't annoy people with recaptcha.
If someone was unable to get past that captcha (it still happens I have logs!) I figured they were probably not that valuable a contributor anyway.

If someone wanted to target my site directly they could but hasn't happened so far.

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Reminds me of a guy who implemented a pre-screen on his phone calls to stop spammers. He said he wanted to use something simple at first and that he planned to tweak it depending upon how many spammers go through. So his phase one it asks "Dial 1 to continue". But that was enough to stop all the spam calls so he never had to improve it.

I did the same for my parents home phone. Completely stopped all spam calls!

re: someone was unable to get past that captcha - this reminded me a story I heard back in ICQ times about some human who couldn't pass anti-bot question: "What planet do we live on?"

Fair enough… one can only speak for oneself, after all.

I remember a friend's con-group forums who had an issue along these lines - the anti-bot question was "What is the brightest thing in the sky at noon?" the expected answer was "the sun", but some guy got stuck because he was answering "Sol". Since they had an IRC channel the issue was relatively quickly resolved, but it was an in-joke for some time.

The key takeaway is that if you have a second line of communication, humans can use it but bots won't - "Issues registering? Contact someemail or see us on IRC/Discord" can do wonders.

A niche dark souls forum sounds interesting, any chance I could get a link?

You misread the post. That was just an example. A niche dark souls forum wouldn't have 500k users lol.

This has worked greatly for me as well. Cuts out pretty much all automated spam that isn't targetted specifically to you.

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