Why not add Captcha to making an account?

[TheBigTroll]

Why not add a captcha option when you make an account for toms hardware to prevent some spam accounts? It will at least stop some of them from auto-generating accounts

 

[randomizer]

It depends how determined they are to use this specific website for spamming. If they aren't using it simply because it's easy, but are targeting it specifically, then CAPTCHA will do nothing to stop them. There is a reason why many companies are phasing out CAPTCHA on their websites: it is usually more difficult for a human to break than a bot.

 

[justinblue]

TheBigTroll,

That is something we are considering. However, in our experience, the spam accounts created on Tom's aren't created by robots. Even though the posts may look robotic, since we have a custom system, its not likely that robots created the accounts and posted. Most of the spam companies have armies of low paid people to do their work for them.

Some of our other sites do have captchas but pretty much get the same spam. That's why we feel it is still being created by humans.

Something else we are working on rolling out soon is a junk filter. That should catch most spam whether it is posted robotically or not. That should be coming out very soon.

Thank you!
Justin

 

[TheBigTroll]

ah ok. also, i find the junk detector tends to mark short responses as junk and posts with links to guides as commercial spam. any update on whether that might change or be fixed?

 

[justinblue]

TheBigTroll,

Its constantly improving over time, and as we give it more and more "false-positives" to learn by, it should get better. Hopefully pretty soon!

Justin