Question

I dont have any problems with spam bots (yet).

Do you really have to use captcha? I hate it myself, some can be hard to read

What about just one field with a simple question any human could answer?

like “what animal is Donald Duck?”

then in php i check if its = duck.

maybe load some diffrent questions from db

How can spambots figure this out?

cant understand how spambots can figure this out? does it goggle it etc? Maybe someone can explain how spambots work?

Maybe i dont even need this kind of things because you have to email activate your account anyway ( i delete accounts not activated within 1 week)

Tell me what you think

Answer 1

I think you’ll find a few techniques combined are helpful.

1. Similar to StackOverflow – limit activity to a threshold (e.g. votes per day/per 5 seconds)
2. A honey pot on signup/registration or commenting is a nice addition (Google it)
3. If allowing comments, with links, the nofollow option will reduce the “benefit” for spammers spamming your site/app with links
4. Provide a captcha where needed – you want to strive for distorted enough that it is hard for bots to solve, but simple enough that users aren’t pulling their hair out trying to figure it out
5. Enable other users to flag users/content so that the site/app becomes self-managing
6. Determine where “suspicious” activity is occurring, and flag those users for moderation
7. Remove all spam content so that there is no “gain” for the spammer – many blogs don’t do/allow this allowing the spam to live forever