When signing up on another game forum they had a game knowledge question requirement. It was super basic and in Infinity game knowledge questions it could be as simple as "Who is the #1 hyper power." or "What does ARO stand for?" I'd think this would help cut down on the spam. Is having an ITS account still a requirement?
@Balewolf: all they need is to use a search engine for some of those questions. It can be tricky, hard questions can disallow unexperienced gamers. @gregmurdock: Yes, it's possible to do that kind of restriction. They probably would spam via replies anyway until they reach the limit. Some can be fast.
Aren't they just bots though? I know Chinese labor is cheap, but if it's actually someone on a keyboard, even running scripts, I can't believe they'd make any money doing this.
There is a lot of automation of course, many computers/phones per supervisor. If you put some questions, they can look them up (or the one above those humans) and automatize them. Searching "corvus belli aro meaning" or "corvus belli number one hyperpower" gave useful replies in the first page (and they could also brute force based on that). Spoiler China, Philippines, Thailand, any place with people in need of income will have businesses to send spam, create fake likes, build huge list of followers or whatever they are paid to do. Oh, and of course, imagine if they just use prisioners. Cheap got cheaper. We know about Russian operations too, and the Western run one I know about will probably surprise you: Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Also, Aristeia players who might not know ARO come here. Would be weird to force them to google that just to chat about Aristeia.
One of the other tabletop gaming forums I'm on had a picture with a word in red text. You had to enter the word in red. I'm FALANT (slightly red-green) colorblind, I could still tell which word was not like the others. It at least forces a human to login to each account, and doesn't require Google reCaptcha.
There are more colors (and computer tools to simulate and verify you picked the right ones), and such things can also be done with bold/italic/underline, different sizes, arrows, brackets...
Are you providing more ideas, or saying that there are now software tools that can tell colors in a picture?
I was really only pointing the first, but it's both. If you need to mark something, there are ways to do so in color-blind compatible ways. There are programs to show you what others will see, so you can notice what doesn't work at all... and also tools to try to compensate and change colors so they are more obvious, most phones have this now for example. It's a well researched topic (the test of numbers made with color dots is a century old, eg), so it can be done right for things without computers, just follow the rules, like "this color is bad" or "mininum size is X". And programs can do lots of things, including detecting colors, shapes, etc (with different levels of correctness, of course). reCaptcha smells like we are training one such program to be able to drive around better.
Think there's a way to use those tools to figure out what the chosen color letters are without a human yet?
Yes. Once the system knows where the letters are (generic rectangle and "ink-vs-paper"), it's just a matter of checking some pixels. Police use systems like this to read license plates. Parkings too, and they print a personalized ticket. Color is a minor issue, shape is hardest (optical character recognition is decades old), and since neural networks became the rage (mostly because we got more transistors and no clear idea of what to do with them), it has improved a lot (above plate example comes from comparison of classic OCR vs NN system, NN reached 99% while classic was under 66%).
Bugger. I was hoping for a way to avoid reCaptcha, since that apparently isn't a usable system inside China and I don't want to geo-block people because of a small number of assholes clogging our forum with crap.
Gentlemen, I think you are overestimating the bots. Developing a more or less capable AI costs a lot of money and resources (just look at Google's query prediction quality over time), so it is highly doubtful that your dreaded scenarios will come true in the nearest future. I had a forum a while ago and a simple yes-no question "Are you human?" (No being the default answer -- this is important) was enough to stop the bots from registering on my forum. Until someone proves that bots haunting these forums are capable of performing something more complex than leaving the multiple choice question with a default option checked, this security measure will be enough.