Saw a huge drop in spam registrations after one tiny change

I run a forum for vintage camera collectors and was getting like 20 spam signups a day. Three weeks ago I added a simple custom question during registration asking "What year was the Leica M3 introduced?" (answer is 1954). Now I'm down to maybe 2 a week and most of those are obvious bots that can't read. Has anyone else had luck with these kinds of topic-specific questions?

2 comments

2 Comments

john_murphy10d ago

Yeah that's a great point, a lot of people make the mistake of using generic questions like "what is 2+2" or "type the word blue" and the bots are just too good at those now. The specific niche knowledge questions work way better because the spambots aren't programmed to know camera history from 70 years ago. I actually saw a forum for woodworking tools use "What type of saw cuts dovetails" and they said it cut their spam by like 90% too. The key is picking something that requires actual human knowledge of your topic that would be super obvious to a real enthusiast but completely foreign to a bot scouring the internet for answers. You could even rotate the question every few months to keep the bots guessing, maybe ask about the first Nikon F release year or something equally specific to cameras.

wesleybutler10d ago

Have you tried changing the question every month to throw them off?