As long as one is implementing a CAPTCHA, the "reCAPTCHA" [1] is my humble suggestion, I have no idea how the haskellwiki is implemented or how easy this is to implement, but I imagine it couldn't be _that_ hard. /Joe [1] http://recaptcha.net/ Benjamin L.Russell wrote:

On Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:31:49 +0100 (CET), Henning Thielemann wrote:

...

How long will the Wiki account registration be disabled? Would it be possible to ask a question, that real Haskellers could easily answer, but a spambot cannot? E.g. "What's Haskell's surname?"

Indeed. Disabling Wiki account registration indefinitely, and not replacing it by at least some form of automatic registration, risks allowing outsiders to think that the HaskellWiki is somehow run by some "clique," which I'm sure is not the case. Automating the process removes most of the risk of this misimpression.

Why not ask new users to identify letters in a random bitmapped image of a string, as is commonly done? Then any new user who still registers and starts submitting spam can be tracked and moderated.

-- Benjamin L. Russell

Henning Thielemann wrote:

On Fri, 13 Mar 2009, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:

...

Why not ask new users to identify letters in a random bitmapped image of a string, as is commonly done?

I assume, because those images are 1) not accessible by blind people 2) can be decoded by spammers, since they know how the images are generated by common software. Thus my suggestion was a simple Haskell specific question, which cannot be answered by stupid spambots.

http://recaptcha.net is believed to be spam-proof, and there's good reasons to believe so, see http://recaptcha.net/security.html : It starts off with text that can't be OCR'd, in the first place. It also features an audio mode for accessibility. Question-based captchas provide security by rarity. You can be sure that if a spammer really, really wants to spam on the wiki, it won't take long before a program is written that memoises all questions and answers. -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.