2009/3/13 Dmitry Timoshkov <dmi...@codeweavers.com>: > "Ben Klein" <shackl...@gmail.com> wrote: > >>>>> Another thing that would probably help to get rid of spammers' accounts >>>>> is to (regularly) delete all user accounts without a personal page. >>>> >>>> It would also get rid of anyone who did not want to create a home page. >> >> It would also attract spammers to creating personal pages. > > And *that* actually will show the real need for captchas at the login > creation time, and IMO will help fighting with spammers if removing a > personal page will eventually lead to the account removal.
Sure, why not have a captcha? I really don't care either way. But I do object strongly to removing accounts that don't have a personal page. After all, if we do have a spammer problem, we can just disable the offending accounts. Note that in order to be an effective spammer-blocker, the captcha has to have a variable response. Someone suggested "Who is the Wine project maintainer?" as a captcha - this would just require an extra POST field to be added to a spambot's request. Of course, complicated captchas don't keep out manually created spam accounts, only bots.
