RECAPTCHA Update

[Inquisitor S.]

So today 166 open account requests waited for me (English 40K Lex only). Of these I blocked 155 as spambots (~93,4%). Of the blocked spambots 70 accounts had their e-mail addresses confirmed (~45%).

Of the 11 approved accounts I could verify NONE as genuine users with any degree of certainty due to lack of info. Only 5 of the 11 even had their e-mail addresses confirmed; a mere 3 had written ANYTHING into their info box of which 2 were number sequences (phone numbers?). ONE was maybe the name of a homebrew chapter. Or maybe not.

So how am I supposed to work with this?

[Bigred]

Hey Inquisitor S.

I had a similar experience going through about 150 applications about 2 weeks back on the 40K english wiki - with about a dozen being legitimate. There is a LOT of Russian spam out there these days.

I consider the shortened application update from several months back to be a flawed implementation based on the results we are seeing.

I do like the shortened application and we had to do some updates no matter what, to move to the current version of mediawiki.

BUT...

I agree that we need to change the "Info Box" to mandatory, so they have put in something, anything in there we can use to gauge what type of applicant they are. Our programmer is out on holiday, but I will ask him to go in and change the field from optional to mandatory on all the wikis when he is back after the new year.

-Larry