I agree, you're right, to be more accurate, captcha only makes certain that a human is editing the page (then to get more technical, complex bots can solve the captcha). Throttling is also necessary - anything to prevent bots from doing the things they do good.
Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote: On 16/10/2007, Eric K wrote:
There is definitely no way to check if an edit is spam or not, except for capthcha.
I have to point out the flaw in that statement, tenuous thought it is - a CAPTCHA does *not* constitute an anti-spam acid test; all it does is confirms that, to the best of the test's ability (which might not count for anything), that we are dealing with a human being, rather than an automated program.
A human could quite well post spam to his/her heart's content, and would be able to pass a CAPTCHA (we hope). The default configuration settings for ConfirmEdit, which CAPTCHA extensions are based upon, allow registered users to skip these tests, so in theory, one could set up a spam bot with a few minutes of initial human assistance, which is why we supplement such things with throttles, "heuristics" (regular expressions aren't that great in terms of configurability, but I cling to the hope that one day we'll have decent spam-edit detection heuristics, even if just for the basics).
Rob Church
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