: How to tell whether spammers are bots or humans? How can you tell if the people that are spamming your forum or website are in fact bots or human spammers? Please note that the question is

@Moriarity557

It's impossible. You can have signals to improve the likelihood they are a bot or human, but at the end of the day it's impossible to ever know with 100% certainty.

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@Correia994

A best practice shows the following user friendly solution: Add a hidden field in your form. Bots will automatically complete all forms, whilst humans will not since they cannot see the hidden field. When all fields are submitted you know that its a bot and you simply won't allow submitting a message. Works great and there is no extra hassle for your website visitors.

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@Sent6035632

It is quite difficult to tell without adding further checks

I would normally add a question that a computer can't answer. Ie

"If today is Thursday, what is tomorrow?"

"What month comes before October?"

etc.

I use this technique on our forum as well as a Captcha and it has reduced the amount of spam quite considerably. Just having a Captcha wasn't enough and I was still seeing a lot of sign ups.

If your forum is being spammed, you need to also look at why it is such a nice target for spammers. Do you allow links posting for new users? Restrict this and other features that spammers love.

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