I am not aware of a setting that controls the amount of attempts.
As I said, I removed the "replace the letter by number after..." sort of question.
Do you think the "sort and pick" is that hard? I think for that one the example should be clear?
I admit that writing questions like this, makes it easy to loose the feeling for what it's like to answer them.
The challenge is to come up with new type (as in a new sort of puzzle or logic) of questions.
Spamming goes up and down. [1]
The overall amount of actual "buy a watch" spam is very low.
A few "hidden small font link" spammers come buy, every now and then.
The problem is that spammers create accounts for later. They do not spam immediately.
Creating this accounts, while we are not fighting back (and not changing the captcha) means they can set their bot to the known answers, and keep going.
When they then start spamming, we can change the captcha all we want.
In that sense trying to lower this account-hording is a first step of defence. Though I admit, it works for them, as recently the captchas were unchanged for a longer time again.....
Anyway, as far is my observation goes
- Simple "a+b" questions are pointless. It seems to me their bots detect them.
- If the question is less common, or less commonly worded, it takes them a few days or even 1 or 2 weeks to get it => they need to actually put human labour into solving it
While it also causes some work for us (we have that work either way), the idea is to go for the latter. Unfortunately we do not get to do this often enough I.e change questions weekly....
Looking forward:
I replaced the "decode the word" by a new set "Pick and add all prime numbers: ...."
Does that sound more reasonable?
Also do you have ideas (PM me) for more questions like that (where the kind of question is not too commonly found on other sites)?
What about the "sort and pick", knowing that you had it right, and the error must have been something else, do you really think it to be to hard?
Better wording is welcome too.
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[1]
I actually do not follow this all the time.
Most of the moderation is done by others.
The security question however need admin privileges. (Which I have primarily for other reasons).
As so often with open projects, you start on something and new tasks add themself to your list.
So now, I do (whenever I remember) occasionally change the captcha.