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Comment by vidar | Hacker News Reader

This must have been a problem for some time, considering how popular GitHub is. There is no way around spam when running a popular service where the users can create their own content.

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What about old-good CAPTCHA? There are many ways, but all are annoying for normal users.

Even the best captcha methods can be circumvented by farming them out to poorer countries for only pennies.

Hell, you could farm it out to minimum wage workers here in the US. I've seen it done, although I think it would only really work on a large scale if you have a constant stream of captchas.

There's an even cheaper way - host a porn gallery, and require a captcha to access it. Present the captcha you're trying to solve to the horny user.

Captchas just advertise that a service has a spam problem.

You can purchase 1000 captcha solves for $1.39 last time I checked.

CAPTCHA only security is fantastic for spammers.

Yup; $1.39 per 1000 on Deathbycaptcha.com It's cheaper if you buy ~1,000,000+ in bulk.

Or you can buy OCR software that plugs in to your bots; e.g. captchasniper.com

Captcha'd targets are usually higher-quality and more valuable as there is some economic cost of posting to it.

using CAPTCHAs assumes the majority of people are spammers rather than real users. it's an alienating user experience and one that i hope goes away.

I used to quite like the idea of CAPTCHA, but in the past year (or couple of years), reCAPTCHA (easily the most popular CAPTCHA generator) has become sooooo bad that I involuntarily shudder even thinking about CAPTCHAs...

Thanks God for http://bugmenot.com!

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