The forum was tend to be hit by a bot too smart to fall for the honeypot sometime. What’s the idea for a possible better solution?

One thing I read about not too long ago (though I can’t seem to find where) was a delay measuring system. You simply check how long it took someone to write a reply and go from there. This method assumes a bot is just filling as much information as possible in the least time needed.

I needed at least 10 seconds to write the above, and I would only be that fast if I would be copying the text off of something. You can assume even the shortest replies would take 20 seconds to formulate and write out by a human. Since they would probably need to read 1 reply earlier in the thread they are going to lose time there a bot would never lose.

This can be used for spam prevention. Take the timestamp the page was loaded in the browser and compare it to the timestamp on submit. Did the whole thing get written in under 10 seconds do not let it through. You could do a simple word count and add 10 seconds to it for every 30 words: ``floor(preg_match_all('#\w+#',$_POST['text'],$m)/30)*10``

The only problem with this is communicating the first timestamp to the submit page.

Any other options you are thinking of? I’m just hoping you’re not going to get us stuck to a CAPTCHA of some sorts.

(Further reading: smashingmagazine.com/…)