forum security - verification questions, captcha/recaptcha

[brynn]

Hi Friends,
I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the best place, so please feel free to move it, if there's a better place for it.

My co-admin and I are getting acquainted and in my case, re-aquainted with SMF. I remember with my SMF forum a few years ago, I took it as a challenge to try and learn what kind of questions the spam bots and other automated things could answer, and to compose verification questions  (they were called "challenge questions" back then) which would beat them.

Recaptcha was pretty new back then, and not part of SMF. But I think we could use captcha via mod.

But now, it seems like every other day there is some news item about AI - artificial intelligence. So I wonder, just how sophisticated are these spam bots (or other - whatever you call them) these days? Does anyone really know how they work, and what they are capable of doing?

I would be so interested to learn what they really can decypher! Does recaptcha block them 100%? Can they read and understand text? Can they do simple math?

To me, it seems like simple text and simple math should be no problem for the bots. But I don't really know. It's just a guess. Does anyone know, or is everyone pretty much guessing?

Thanks for any comments 

[durangod]

Bots have come a long ways since the early days.  Now days we have really smart bots that can look up answers on the web.  But one thing bots still cant do is reason.  Now AI certainly will help in that direction but as far as i know they are still not there yet.  So if you post a question to a bot where they have to reason it out, more times then not they will fail. 

Here are some example questions:

If you had 10 eggs, a pig, 5 goats, and some pancake batter, how many boiled eggs could you make ?

A hammer is to a nail as a sail is to a b _ _ _       (answer is boat)


I think it would be very difficult for a bot to reason those out, AI might be able to but im doubtful.  So you have to phrase your questions in a way where reasoning is required IMO.

Honestly there is not anthing out there at this moment IMO that is perfect but i think questions are one of the most powerful things we have.   You just have to have enough of them to be sure they dont keep getting the same question over and over again.  Also remember that there are still humans behind the bots sometimes and they can reason just like you and me and tell the bots the answer.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

There isn't really a perfect one size fits all solution. Generally, I've found Stop Forum Spam and good security questions to be a good combo.