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

[rebelsheart]

This makes sense to me.

[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]

I'd like to see something like this. I'm getting really tired of cleaning up spam in all my communities and reporting bots all over LJ.

[daluci]

The argument I've seen against that is that if someone chooses to change personal journals without a rename, they have a reason to. (I don't get how someone can have that many comms in general, but)