Registration at Atlantic Forums

[Atlantic]

This isn't necessarily a matter for NexAds support, but I am asking the community for some feedback...so if this is moved, that's fine.

Long story first:  when I first started the Forums, I had some problems with spambots, mostly from Ukraine.  They had solved the countermeasure fairly easily and mucked up my boards.  So I changed things around a bit: first, banning the sites by IP, and second, instituting a Q-and-A test for registration instead.  And I lucked upon one that works very, very well, because when you feed the question into Google, you get the wrong answer.

The question is, in what city is my company located?  Google returns the home city of a larger and very similarly named company.  My own company is the second hit, and while that is not ideal with regards to growing my business, it's very good when stopping Ukrainian (and other) spammers right in their tracks.  I haven't had a problem since.

However, because of the ads here, I now have registrants who could come from anywhere on the globe and wouldn't necessarily know what city I'm in.  So I added a link to a short information page about my company that's located through a link right there on the registration page, which contains the name of the city we are headquartered in.

If you have a chance, please head over to my forums (the link is in the sig), click on the Register link (and the click-through agreement), and see if you understand the question and the information provided for it.  The goal is to be easy for any human to understand, but impossible for a spammer to get, even when using Google.

[Skyon Archer]

While I commend your initiative to implement something to keep your forum spam free, I'm afraid you may be making it too difficult for "normal" people to register.

Basically, you will force someone to dig through topics/posts, or result to going to your homepage or Google, to find the answer?

So you are basically driving them away in hopes they come back with the correct answer.

I'd rather you consider implementing Google reCaptcha, in addition to a question/answer input. "Add two plus 6. Spell out your answer", "What is the name of the rock circling the earth. All capital letters in your answer", etc.

Else, I'm afraid you are going to see your registration rate fall to zero.

[Ryan]

I agree with Archer here.

When I registered at your board (last week was it?) I admit I had moderate difficulty answering the verification question and creating an account. It wasn't that the "riddle" was particularly tricky, but rather it forced me to read the contents of the page entirely to discover where the answer was located.

My purpose for joining your community was investigative in nature so this was not a deterrent for me. But consider a person who might be signing up to ask a real question. You want that person to be able to engage with your community somewhat effortlessly, and if they are stopped at the gate by an unusual verification question this might send them elsewhere.

[Atlantic]

Well, I appreciate the feedback.  I tend to overthink things sometimes.  I've installed a different process, which I'm going to test...hopefully it will be easy for users but still difficult for bots.

[Skyon Archer]

Click "List of Words" below. Choose the animal from the list and write it here with the second letter capitalized.:
This question is a means of preventing automated form submissions by spambots.

There is no "list of words" visible

[Atlantic]

You're not seeing this?

[Skyon Archer]

Where is the list of words to click?

[Atlantic]

It's the link entitled "List of Words" that I circled in the screenshot.