Travisher wrote:I've been running with Q&A for nearly a year and I have administrative activation. The questions I have are very specific to my niche interest group and can only be answered by careful reading of the site. In the last 3 weeks the number of attempted spam sign-ups has rocketed. Occam's razor says that the spambots have a way of bypassing the CAPCHA completely since unless they are programmed with the answers they cannot answer the questions.
It's a good point. I'm careful not to set "multiple choice" questions as I think a reasonably sophisticated bot can find the right answer by trying information given in the question.
Things have slowed a little for me by switching to the reCaptcha module - but it's hard for me to know how much of an impact this actually had as I've now also banned entire swathes of Russian and Ukrainian IP ranges at server level (I've never had any genuine punters from those countries).
I think you're right, it seems a bit of a coincidence that the bots should suddenly be able to find the answers to multiple sites' Q&A captcha at the same time. I thought they may be using humans to crack the captcha - but, as you say, they may have found a way to bypass it altogether.