[REQ] Spam tickets passing captcha.

[Alex]

It started backup the following night. And we have been spammed constantly since.  I have it as dark gray numbers on a black background but somehow the spam bots can still read it....

I am open for suggestions at this point.

I would suggest implementing the solution you described in very first post. You may also want modifying it slightly after observing spambot traffic patterns, as we did on this forum  - the trick you see is only a top of the iceberg, but (hint, hint!) I will never discuss all the details on public forum.

[Sparky]

I can't dispute what you say, but most of my abuse does indeed come from the same geographic areas and IP addresses.  I've seen a dramatic reduction by using blocking.

It should be noted that my audience is not international so blocking chunks of foreign countries in not a problem in my situation. 

[DNSinSC]

For years, on our mail system, we use custom scripts and our own RBL and just block ranges of IPs incoming smtp. It is a constant, daily battle that never ends.  The spammer pollutes a range of IP Addresses, gets them all banned incrementally, and then moves on to new ones.  I have banned 254 IPs and the following week be getting the same spam from a new IP range. They got a new host or hacked another mail server. A perfect solution would be to end the battle instead of continuing it.  But, at the moment, it is about the best solution and has taken our email from 300+ spams a day to 1-2.

On our website though, we want people to be able to view it.  With dynamic IP Addresses changing all the time, the spammers IP we block today could belong to a potential customer tomorrow.

I think that adding a custom question to TTX would end the battle... No one will spend the time developing a spam bot for a single site. And if they did, you can just change the question.  When I get a little time to work on it, I will try and add an additional question to our TTX system.