2009/3/13 Dmitry Timoshkov dmitry@codeweavers.com:
"Ben Klein" shacklein@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.