Thank You Mods (job well done)

[skotl]

In some ways, it's amazing how little is needed to stop spammers as long as it's something that's a bit different to what most websites use. I have a contact form on my website and there was a lot of c*ap getting past CAPTCHA so I added a very simple question. I was a bit nervous about blocking valid requests because of people not understanding the question so I set up the initial configuration to accept absolutely anything: as long as you typed something into the box, it would accept it.

That turned out to be sufficient: I haven't had any spam through the contact form since. All the spammers (which are probably bots) just leave the box empty. so it gets rejected.

Indeed, as most of the attempts are automated. In the examples that woz is posting, I expect there is a "bot" (which is just fancy-talk for a piece of software) that is hunting the internet for Xenforo forums - it then sends a somewhat-randomised set of fake credentials and common answers, such as "What car do you drive", which is probably in the default Xenforo forum template.

Automation to defeat captcha is also pretty straightforward so your solution is almost guaranteed to defeat most of the automated attempts.