Registration question

[Reaver]

So this may be a stupid question, but when it asks you if you are human during registration, and you have to type yes or no, does it still accept if you say no? It seems pretty obvious that you'd have to be both human and a smartass to put that as an answer, so does it just weed out the smartasses?

[Maxios]

Well, I doubt it does a good job of weeding the smartasses out, or else I wouldn't be here.

[Mystic Muse]

So this may be a stupid question, but when it asks you if you are human during registration, and you have to type yes or no, does it still accept if you say no? It seems pretty obvious that you'd have to be both human and a smartass to put that as an answer, so does it just weed out the smartasses?

It's an extra security measure against spambots.

[Dark Elf Bard]

Why wouldn't spambots answer "yes?":smallconfused:

[Jasdoif]

Why wouldn't spambots answer "yes?":smallconfused:A spambot would have to "know" to. One without special awareness of the question on this site would likely take the default of "maybe", or perhaps use the username it tried to register with or a profile-type value. That would prevent its registration (unless it tried to use "yes" as the value for some reason).

Countermeasures like this work well against fully automated processes that look for sites with particular forum software and mimic common registration procedures.

[Rawhide]

A spambot would have to "know" to. One without special awareness of the question on this site would likely take the default of "maybe", or perhaps use the username it tried to register with or a profile-type value. That would prevent its registration (unless it tried to use "yes" as the value for some reason).

Countermeasures like this work well against fully automated processes that look for sites with particular forum software and mimic common registration procedures.

This. It's much harder to customise spambots to a forum that has elected to do something out of the ordinary to the registration system such as this. In a lot of cases, modified forums will be skipped over in favour of the standard, unmodified, ones.

It doesn't stop all spambots, some will be customised for different forums, and the larger the forums are, the more likely it will happen.

[Rockphed]

This. It's much harder to customise spambots to a forum that has elected to do something out of the ordinary to the registration system such as this. In a lot of cases, modified forums will be skipped over in favour of the standard, unmodified, ones.

It doesn't stop all spambots, some will be customised for different forums, and the larger the forums are, the more likely it will happen.

Out of curiosity, do you keep track of the rate of spam bot attacks, or is that a meaningless point of data? If you do, have spam bot attacks changed since the addition of the ads?

[Rawhide]

Out of curiosity, do you keep track of the rate of spam bot attacks, or is that a meaningless point of data? If you do, have spam bot attacks changed since the addition of the ads?

We don't personally keep detailed statistics on it, though the changes are very obvious even without them and the data is stored in logs we could retrieve - but that point of data is far from meaningless. It is a well documented statistic that has been tested by multiple companies.