Alright, so I'm sure a majority of you have seen the spambots on this website. I'm not sure whether this suggestion would stop them or not, but here it is anyways:...
A "Confirmation" question! Essentially, when signing up, along with all your other signup questions, theres also a confirmation question, such as...
"What is the default Minecraft characters name" and you would answer Steve.
I think this would essentially stop the spambots. Additionally, the question would change every time.
Thoughts?
These answers would eventually become part of a large spam database, where spambots would then pull the answers for this eventually. It's inevitable, and the best thing we can continue doing is what I'm doing now.
We're banning / deleting the spambots as we go along, and I'm banning entire datacenters from our website to prevent spambots.
The following is the IP banned list:
142.4.101.64/21 # Manually denied - Thu Aug 1 17:35:18 2013
192.74.224.0/19 # Manually denied - Thu Aug 1 17:36:58 2013
37.187.0.0/16 # Manually denied - Thu Aug 1 17:40:06 2013
142.0.128.0/20 # Manually denied - Thu Aug 1 17:42:27 2013
198.2.192.0/18 # Manually denied - Thu Aug 1 17:44:44 2013
198.200.32.0/19 # Manually denied - Thu Aug 1 23:58:37 2013
137.175.0.0/17 # Manually denied - Thu Aug 1 23:59:24 2013
142.0.32.0/20 # Manually denied - Fri Aug 2 02:00:41 2013
88.160.0.0/11 # Manually denied - Sat Aug 3 19:33:29 2013
142.4.96.0/19 # Manually denied - Tue Aug 6 13:15:40 2013
95.67.80.0/19 # Manually denied - Tue Aug 6 13:17:46 2013
178.73.192.0/18 # Manually denied - Tue Aug 6 17:30:32 2013
199.15.232.0/21 # Manually denied - Wed Aug 7 02:29:26 2013
5.254.144.0/24 # Manually denied - Fri Aug 9 01:33:00 2013
176.31.0.0/16 # Manually denied - Thu Sep 5 19:26:20 2013
199.103.56.0/21 # Manually denied - Thu Sep 5 23:24:35 2013
91.121.0.0/18 # Manually denied - Fri Sep 6 12:02:59 2013
199.195.212.0/22 # Manually denied - Fri Sep 6 14:34:42 2013
66.132.128.0/17 # Manually denied - Fri Sep 6 14:41:12 2013
89.169.128.0/18 # Manually denied - Mon Sep 9 03:55:26 2013
198.100.144.0/20 # Manually denied - Mon Sep 9 03:56:27 2013
58.22.123.147 # Manually denied - Mon Sep 9 03:56:59 2013
209.21.64.0/19 # Manually denied - Mon Sep 9 04:57:21 2013
192.200.96.0/19 # Manually denied - Mon Sep 9 13:07:02 2013
188.165.0.0/16 # Manually denied - Mon Sep 9 13:09:57 2013
125.62.124.53 # Manually denied - Mon Sep 9 13:14:23 2013
124.253.241.26 # Manually denied - Mon Sep 9 13:15:20 2013
202.126.122.147 # Manually denied - Mon Sep 9 13:15:32 2013
The IP ranges (IP addresses with /XX afterwards) are massive amounts of IPs. For example, a /24 is 256 IP addresses. A /21 is 2048 IP addresses.
We ensure that we're only banning proxies and datacenters, thus any home connections will not be blocked.