I am working on hosting a message board using SMF, and apparently the default captcha settings aren't adequate at all - the spambots get through them quite easily.

I saw on another forum (I don't think it was WinBoards) that all accounts who filled in profile info during registration (which spambots always do) were not accepted. Thought that was a good idea but haven't found any way to do it with SMF. Is there a way?

For now I'll just turn up the CAPTCHA and/or try question-based stuff.

I've always wanted to see KittenAuth implemented, maybe you could try that for a CAPTCHA? I don't know anything about SMF, though, can't advise if it's actually doable.

Why don't you change the template so that the profile fields have the type 'hidden'?

And how exactly, does that stop spam registrations?

If the hidden fields are filled out, then it's spam?

I thought he was suggesting to make all the profile fields hidden during registration, which didn't make any sense. Besides, some legit users fill out profile info during registration.

But if you made a hidden field that the spam bot would try to fill out... maybe. It's easy enough to do, but that depends on the PHP skills of the original poster.

I didn't mean to hide them, though that is similar to what I was saying. I was saying to mark as spam all users who fill in profile info during registration. The fields are there for people to fill in - however, there should be a message telling legitimate users to wait until after registration to fill in their profile.

I've seen it once before and I thought it would be reasonable spam protection. This works because literally every spam bot fills in random profile info, avatar, etc. during registration, and the spambots won't read the message telling them not to.

I don't really have PHP skills. So I'll just forget about it

Some interesting reading on CAPTCHAs I came across while doing some other research:

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/2 ... an-captcha
http://uxmovement.com/forms/captchas-vs ... tcha-wins/

Nice links nightice, but I find the comments section in the second link to be far more interesting than the article itself.