Decius wrote:

] Nice.
]
] So, any technological effort to prevent bot attacks is going
] to be easy to defeat. This may actually push demand for a
] federated identity system for the internet. The people
] managing systems will be responsible for verifying that their
] users are real people. An easy way to do this is to require
] telephone authentication (the way GeoTrust does for their
] personal SSL certificates) and not offer more then 10
] addresses per phone number.
]
] There are also interesting questions here about reputation
] carrying over between communities. You might need to gain a
] large audience on, say, MemeStreams before you are allowed to
] join another community with a more controlled atmosphere...

What about asking random and somewhat senseless obvious questions in that scrambled anti-bot type? Such as
"Which is better to cook, rocks or food?"
"Do you prefer to go to the bathroom in your bed or a toilet?"
"Which comes first, today or the day after?"

terratogen wrote:
] What about asking random and somewhat senseless obvious
] questions in that scrambled anti-bot type? Such as
] "Which is better to cook, rocks or food?"

It presents too many logistical problems. I need thousands of questions like that, I obviously can't generate them using an algorithm. Captcha can be generated automatically. I also need questions that are specific to my site. If everyone uses the same questions then they'll fall into the spammer's hands. Furthermore, there is the question of parsing the answer provided.

Decius wrote:
] There are also interesting questions here about reputation
] carrying over between communities. You might need to gain a
] large audience on, say, MemeStreams before you are allowed to
] join another community with a more controlled atmosphere ...

Are you proposing some kind of caste system for Internet communities?

It's interesting that you would put MemeStreams in the lower caste.

noteworthy wrote:
] Are you proposing some kind of caste system for Internet
] communities?

I don't think caste system is the right word at all. Caste is determined by birth. Its a straight hierarchy and no mobility. This would not look like that at all. However, by requiring new members to have established at least a baseline reputation in another respected community some communities will be able to protect themselves from spammers and newbies. This is already occurring. Systems like the one I propose will help it.

] It's interesting that you would put MemeStreams in the lower
] caste.

I'm just providing an example. MemeStreams has a reputation system, and so it is more likely to be in the "lower" or "open" "caste" whereas lower tech sites would go into the "higher" or "closed" "castes" because they can't handle the filtering on their own and need to piggyback.