skirtcafe.org

Given the considerable amount of grief that the use of anti-robot "captcha" techniques cause to folks with rotten eyesight or, sometimes, just "over a given age", and in light of new technologies for identifying potential sources of spam and trash, a decision was made by consensus of the Barista and the Moderation Staff to end the use of the technique on an experimental basis.

I made the change at about 12:20 UTC (07:20 EST) this morning, and we will be running without the use of captchas going forward so long as the change does not cause the moderators (myself included) excessive extra work. If we find ourselves innundated with pink slime we'll have to turn them back on in self-defence, but that is hoped to be unneccessary.

The ultimate hope is to draw users who have fought with the technique in the past and ease the grief suffered by the membership here while at the same time preserving the high signal/noise ratio needed for survival.

Carl,
I have been playing around with a technique I am using for some of my sites, that is, when I present the "form" to whoever lands on my site, I present the form with a built-in timestamp pulled from the current time on the server. Then, when the form is submitted, I check the server time once again and subtract the difference. If the time is considerably less than what I assume it would normally take a live "human" to fill out and submit the form, I throw the results away and assume it was a robot.

The other thing I do is scan the form with "http" and "www" and if those are found in the wrong places (like the questions or comments section), I throw it away and assume some human is SPAMMING me.

So far, it was working well for me. I use it on "contact" or "email list signup" forms.

Not sure if any of this would apply here, but if so, it might cut down on some of what your are getting clobbered with.