the only wining move against spam is to make it easier to clean up than it is to spam.
captcha only benefit google and the like, who couldn't care less for the community or content. Captcha makes honest content (and spam cleanup) more expensive than the spam! it's a losing proposition that only looks good when you look at it without considering all the situations.
make honest content (and spam) easy, but cleaning up easier. Things like every user can flag something, after a certain number of flags, also remove other content from the same IP (or same bundle of users with a close registration time window) automatically. And of course a feature for admins to automatically ban and erase content from users wrongly flagging honest content.
It's harder than captcha, but it is an actual solution. Captcha is lazy and ableist.
This is exactly why I do not want to do captcha. I don't want more third party analytics, tracking, or making our players solve endless captchas.
We are a gaming community that also has some older folk that we'd like to be accomodating for. Most of the cheapo PHP captcha libraries don't support any form of accessibility, or if they do it's a vulnerability that allow instant solving.
Part of the problem is that we can moderate just fine, but we can't moderate or look through hundreds of thousands of new registrations - just need something to somehow get rid of 99% of the garbage automatically.
And what do you do when your forum has thousands of bots posting spam images every second, completely overwhelming user posts? Captcha may be imperfect, but the alternative is forcing the userbase of your website to manually flag every spam item, which is fine if there are only a couple, but without captcha, there will be more than a couple.
captcha only benefit google and the like, who couldn't care less for the community or content. Captcha makes honest content (and spam cleanup) more expensive than the spam! it's a losing proposition that only looks good when you look at it without considering all the situations.
make honest content (and spam) easy, but cleaning up easier. Things like every user can flag something, after a certain number of flags, also remove other content from the same IP (or same bundle of users with a close registration time window) automatically. And of course a feature for admins to automatically ban and erase content from users wrongly flagging honest content.
It's harder than captcha, but it is an actual solution. Captcha is lazy and ableist.