[OSM-talk] Still need for spam protection and if yes, what about OSM-based CATPCHA?

[Ilya Zverev]

Stefan Keller wrote:
> Actually, I'd like to hear the opinions of those website admins who
> really are affected by spam registrations (see subject).
> For those who hate CAPTCHAs please provide alternative solutions.
> Whitelists or bayesian filter are not among them.

Hi. In some cases captchas are good, but mostly their presence shows 
that admins/moderators in a project are lazy and don't value users' 
time. It's quite easy to repel bots with other means. I maintained an 
open guestbook that had seen only a couple of bots a month (without 
captcha), and shtosm.ru (the Russian OSM blog) has not seen a single 
spammer in two years, though it doesn't require registration or reading 
mangled words for commenting. After captcha was removed from the OSM 
wiki (it was shown for users who added new external links in pages), I 
doubt it started receiving noticeably more spam than before.


IZ