Making life "hard" for spambots

[viking60]

Catching on to the subtle hints from dedanna I have made life a bit harder for spammers.
Our Chinese friends mostly dissappeard when I excluded the Chinese telecom from the server. But the Russians (and Latvia and Ukraine) have been a slight pain in the but - spam wise.
As it was the Captcha (you know those strange letters you have to register), and the confirmation by email was not enough to fool the spambots. The thing that separates the bots from humans is the lack of ability to think (most of our forum members are able to ). So I have added a simple question that the bot will have to answer during the registration process.

They really are getting advanced those spambots these days. They handle the registration process to an ability where it is almost better than humans in reading those cryptic Captcha letters.
So it is no solution to go further down that road if we want registration to be humanly possible.
Can you see what is added in the registration process?

This does not make registration any harder but it will sure exclude most robots. And if one makes it - I have more up my sleeve
Manual registrations will have to be moderated manually but that is no big deal.

I am actually curious if a bot will make it this time.

[dedanna1029]

Yeah, I'm getting REAL pissed at these bastards. This place was home to me from the get-go, as you know, and I helped get it going. These spamming morons are violating my home, and I've had it with it. I used to catch them before they even hit the board here.
The real deal for me, is now, in seeing when they've spammed us, not being able to do anything about it. Of course, I'd love to do something real mean , but as it is, I can't do anything any more. It's a very helpless feeling.

[viking60]

Not even in the forums you moderate? Any way I think spambots are history for a while!

[dedanna1029]

Nope, the only rights I have even in the forums I moderate, is reading the logs. There literally isn't anything else useful I can do (and that's not even useful when I can't act on them). This is why I've been screaming so loudly at you when I see a spammer, and requested publicly to have banning rights back in that one thread (can't find it now, sorry; I may have deleted the post later). It's also why I sent the tweets to you that I did, and emailed you with the request a while back. I'm quite literally co-moderator of those forums in name only. No sense in being so, really, so am now requesting that you bust me back down to zero, because that's what I am anyway. Sorry, but when I'm given a job to do, I'm either going to do it and do what's right by it, or I don't want it at all.

Edit: Initially when I came back too, I requested to be taken off of the "Welcome" section, which never happened. There is no way in hell that thing needs two moderators. For that matter, there's no reason in hell for any section of this forum to have two moderators. Yet.

Edit 2: I will also say that since I left initially, that this has all been very hurtful to watch. Every instinct I've had has been to nail these dirtbags, but there was literally nothing I could do. I also have to question our global moderator on these things, when in the logs point-blank, they show that every single action on moderating has been taken by you (although I understand you wanting to have the global moderator you do, I also think that it hasn't been helpful here). It's been the main source of my lack of enthusiasm for this forum any more, and remains so. I've been told by my own mate and friends both to blow it off when it happens, but so far they've been unsuccessful in getting me to do this - they don't understand.

[viking60]

The quoting of emails is against the forum rules. Moderators are expected to keep them. And you do have banning rights now, that was an error on my part.

[dedanna1029]

Fine, it's gone. But really,

I'd just rather be busted down now. I've had well more than my share of, I think, and more than I care to have of the b.s. machine here.