Risker wrote:
Putting on my checkuser hat for a moment - yes, please please look at finding a different CAPTCHA process - the cross-wiki spamming by bots that are able to "break" the CAPTCHA is becoming overwhelming. This issue has been reported separately, and there may be a different fix, but this is a pretty big deal as a few hundred volunteer hours a month are going into the despamming effort.
Reported separately where?
CAPTCHAs were designed for "test if you're human," not "test if you're spam." It's a wonder they've worked this long. I imagine better anti-spam tools are needed (which may be a new extension, new AbuseFilter filters, better user scripts, etc.).
If the situation is as dire as it sounds, it shouldn't be difficult to find a few resources to throw at the problem. In a discussion like this, examples of particular problematic behavior (links!) are always most helpful to developers, I've found. "This is the bad behavior we're seeing and want to stop. How should we do that?" :-)
MZMcBride