Recaptcha required to join a community

[daluci]

Title
Recaptcha required to join a community

Short, concise description of the idea
Require users trying to join a community to pass a spambot challenge.

Full description of the ideaThere's been a recent spurt of spammy/malware-linking videos showing up in communities I watch on my friendspage. Most of these spam journals are members of more than a

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Communities with an absentee maintainer and an active spam problem can get reported to Support for Abuse nudging of the maintainer, also.

On the one hand, more barriers to spambots are good. On the other hand, anywhere there's a CAPTCHA, there's an accessibility problem for vision-impaired users, text browser/screen reader users, hearing-impaired, Deaf, and audio processing disorder users.

Though I wouldn't be horribly opposed to the idea of an optional CAPTCHA and having users failing the CAPTCHA but who still wanted in winding up in the same sort of queue that gets used for moderated membership communities.

I am vaguely amused because I recently found myself making a note: "Banned on account of trying to join [personal writing comm with moderated membership] in possession of a spammer journal" -- and then saw the same journal spamming up another community.

Oh, how I hate spammers.

[daluci]

I may give that a shot. Some of the communities have mods who just check in every month or so -- which is fine for them, but the message has already been up for ages.

Yeah, that's true. I was hoping that the fact that it shows up on account creation made it somewhat more okay, but it's still a difficulty.

Yeah, one of my me-only communities keeps getting join requests from unknown (likely bot) users. You just made me realize I should be reporting them.

[pauamma]

Doesn't account creation require a CAPTCHA anyway? (IIRC it used to.) Any bot that manages to jump that hurdle would likely be able to do so for the community-join CAPTCHA as well.

[daluci]

Account creation does, yes. CAPTCHA is also required to suubmit comments once a post reaches a certain limit, though, and I was hoping the additional 100+ iterations during community joining might cause some kind of slowdown in spam posts. If CAPTCHA isn't doing any good, I kind of wonder why it shows up anywhere other than account creation, but that's how spam battling works, I guess.

[midnightmadness]

That logic doesn't really follow as it assumes the accounts are bot created. It's like asking "how did the thief get into all the rooms in my house if my front door was locked?" He only has to get past the one door. A human can still create an account in two minutes, and then still automate everything else from joining 500 communities and auto posting in all of them.

[mlady_rebecca]

Though I wouldn't be horribly opposed to the idea of an optional CAPTCHA and having users failing the CAPTCHA but who still wanted in winding up in the same sort of queue that gets used for moderated membership communities.

Sounds like a good way of handling things.

[lady_angelina]

This.

For a good portion of the day, my only access to LiveJournal is via BlackBerry, which doesn't support ReCAPTCHA as it currently is. (And for an entire month, when my old PC died, BlackBerry was my ONLY means of Internet access.)

I know there's the audio challenge, but in order to even get that, you have to be able to load the entire ReCAPTCHA dialogue first, which requires Flash (which BlackBerry doesn't support).

While I can appreciate the problem of spambots, any viable workaround would be ideal to maintain usability for mobile users, etc.

[charliemc]

Oh, how I hate spammers.

No kidding! (Why, why, why???)

Good thoughts, by the way...