Comment by userbinator

Comment by userbinator 4 days ago

7 replies

View on Hacker News

As I've been saying for a while now - if you want to filter for only humans, ask questions only a human can easily answer; counting the number of letters in a word seems to be a good way to filter out LLMs, for example. Yes, that can be relatively easily gotten around, just like Anubis, but with the benefit that it doesn't filter out humans and has absolutely minimal system requirements (a browser that can submit HTML forms), possibly even less than the site itself.

There are forums which ask domain-specific questions as a CAPTCHA upon attempting to register an account, and as someone who has employed such a method, it is very effective. (Example: what nominal diameter is the intake valve stem on a 1954 Buick Nailhead?)

ack_complete 4 days ago

For smaller forums, any customization to the new account process will work. When I ran a forum that was getting a frustratingly high amount of spammer signups, I modified the login flow to ask the user to add 1 to the 6-digit number in the stock CAPTCHA. Spam signups dropped like a rock.

Reply View 0 replies
never_inline 3 days ago

> counting the number of letters in a word seems to be a good way to filter out LLMs

As long as this challenge remains obscure enough to be not worth implementing special handlers in the crawler, this sounds a neat idea.

But I think if everyone starts doing this particular challenge (char count), the crawlers will start instructing a cheap LLM to do appropriate tool calls and get around it. So the challenge needs to be obscure.

I wonder if anyone tried building a crawler-firewall or even nginx script which will let the site admin plug their own challenge generator in lua or something, which would then create a minimum HTML form. Maybe even vibe code it :)

Reply View 0 replies
soared 4 days ago

Tried and true method! An old video game forum named moparscape used to ask what mopar was and I always had to google it

Reply View 2 replies
  • Aachen 3 days ago

    Good thing modern bots can't do a web search!

    Reply View 1 reply
    • userbinator 3 days ago

      They will be as likely if not more so to fall victim to the large amount of misinformation... and AI-generated crap you'll find from doing so.

      Reply View 0 replies
cm2012 4 days ago

There is a decent segment of the population that will gave a hard time with that.

Reply View 1 reply