The Mosquito Crate: a CAPTCHA Exclusively for Spammers
September 2, 2015 6:02 PM   Subscribe

The Mosquito Crate: a CAPTCHA Exclusively for Spammers
This summer, our forums were inundated with spam. Lots and lots of spam. Because I can't mail the spammers a crate of mosquitos, I made a CAPTCHA that only they can see, and that can't possibly be answered correctly.

The answers are taken from a Markov chain through the rules for the Pathfinder roleplaying game. No matter what the spammer enters, their answer will be wrong. And it'll tell them in detail why.

(Unless they are presented with a random error code corresponding to a monster with a sock on its back. If you get one of those, just refresh the page.)

Only accounts identified as spammers are sent to the CAPTCHA, but I figured others might be amused by it, so here we are.
Role: software developer
posted by bigbigdog (6 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

I dunno if it's deliberate, but the "request another" and "submit" button labels keep swapping places, but the buttons' functions do not.
posted by ardgedee at 7:15 PM on September 2, 2015


Pretty much everything about that page is deliberate. I had to restrain myself from putting in randomly malformed HTML to mess with the spammers' browsers. The input box will change size and there's some extra random hidden elements just in case someone's writing the parser for a bot.
posted by bigbigdog at 7:29 PM on September 2, 2015


I guess what I'm saying is, this is what you get when everybody leaves for Gen Con and I've finished my todo list.
posted by bigbigdog at 7:31 PM on September 2, 2015


I like this sophisticated new application of hellbanning!
posted by ignignokt at 7:25 AM on September 3, 2015


Drunken Courage (Su): At will, an antipaladin does not require concentration.

Sign me up!
posted by robocop is bleeding at 11:19 AM on September 3, 2015


Great idea. Death to all spammers. I found that requiring newly registered users to make an initial post on a subforum only they can see has saved me hours of killing spammers by hand. If you want to see this in practice, register here: http://zoomforum.us/
posted by Outlawyr at 9:40 AM on September 6, 2015


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