Try the topic in the game discussion, funnily enough called "About registering". It's one of the sticky topics and is located here

Sadly the admins Richard and Senderman found it necessary to make a slightly odd registration procedure in order to stop spam bots. It must have worked, we haven't had any reports about posts in something like 3 and a half months.

If you've ever heard some of those audio captias out there you know they are pure evil. They have all funny noises in the background, echoes, and goodness knows what else. I suppose it's like visual captias which have funny marks on to disrupt OCR, but frankly they've taken it a bit too far in my opinion. I don't think I've successfully completed an audio captia ever.

That said I've seen somewhere that has an interesting approach. They actually ask a basic question "What is the opposite of cold?" I had wondered for some time if something along these lines might be practical, tricky though with some of the people who haven't quite perfect english on here.

the sites that don't use audio captias but still want accessibility use simpler questions. As long as you understand english numbers, they use math.

"What is 4 + 4?"
And then you type in the number answer. I mean numbers are pretty universal (or so I imagine).

As for audio captias, I don't seem to have too much trouble with them. I think GMail had one, Craigslist has one (and that is one I use constantly). I guess trying to decipher the audio captias is based on your sound card. My Macbook running Windows (bootcamp) using stock soundcard (without my external soundcard) = Epic Fail. Macbook running Windows (bootcamp) with external USB soundcard = score. Macbook running OSX with standard soundcard = score.

Something of a pity really.

Not sure if this would help any, but you could try asking them to copy and paste the information from the address bar in their browser? Just a thought, maybe spambots wouldn't realise to do this (gotta love script kiddies), and it seems simple enough. That said I've little to no experience of web coding, so don't feel I'm trying to argue or challenge the way things have been done.

I remember I was trying to sign up to a website, and they asked questions like "who is Britney Spears?"
The funny thing though, was that even if you got the answers wrong you could still sign up to the website. Doesn't that sort of kill the point?

ahahahahaha!

Laugh, true.

Depends, the bot might... and I stress *might* be designed to ignore fields which it doesn't understand the label to. It could equally be programmed to put in random data, but what if the field is asking for something that is validated? Thinking of something like an MSN contact detail here.

This could just be me imagining things though.

It might defeat bots designed to attack any site they find. Of course if someone particularly targetted the specific site it wouldn't work at all, since it would be so easy to abuse.

Yes, we have had a couple of occasions like that as I believe has Miriani. We once had someone spamming out the forum with text known to crash eloquence, the synth used by Jaws and which is also available to both Window Eyes and Hal I believe. We've also had spam posts of random gibberish completely filling up the topic lists too, no idea if it was the same person or not.

Believe it or not, but there are people in the VI community who are willing to attack parts of the audio gaming community just because they think it's fun and/or clever. Personally I feel we can't afford the potential damage, and they would be harming themselves just as much in the long term. Obviously not everyone is quite as rational as me though.

That better be a joke there. Sometimes crashing eloquents might make the screen reader currupted, very occasionally. Also, another thing we once had, was a spammer who had over 800 posts in one day, filling up the place with topics completely unrelated to games. Me and another forum member noticed it, and we got pretty worked up about it, getting a little worried. Deleting topics had no use, as 2 more filled it's place. The mods went ahead and banned the stupidest of bots ever to set foot upon this website, at least in my opinion it was the stupidest one.

Wouldn't bother me, Orphius is as far as I know uncrashable by basic text I believe, ----- cross fingers!

We did have a spambot last week which posted about 8 threads, but I deleted those and banned the thing. I was slightly concerned that this would open the way to others, but luckily it hasn't, stil, sinse the fartman registration business we've drastically cut down on the things, ----- does this mean Fartman is protecting us from the utter fowlness of spam? That's quite worrying really!

I personally have a symple antidote to audio captures comprising my extremely good sanheisar headphones and loud volume which seems to work pretty well, but obviously not everyone can do this, ---- also I suspect as was said earlier I'm probably lucky in sound card terms, sinse I do remember having extreme trouble with my old laptop.

I once saw one of those text rpg batle games which used a question system with numbers, but would use a combination of text and numerals, ---- Eg, what is 4 pluss f I v e.

To be honest even the basic idea of text which crashes a screen reader seems a litle odd to me, ----- though of course software glitches are tricky things indeed.

i'm not sure if any forum registration system other than some of the captures is %100 spam proof (I have heard of spambots getting around those0, but so long as they can be minimized to the point that they can be controlled without too much effort that is okay.

I believe the ones you and I deleted last week have been the first for a good few months, and, ---- hopefully, we won't see anymore for a similarly long time.

Here's a thought, and a rather daunting one.
What if the ones getting around captchas wern't spam bots, but were people just registering for the hell of it?