News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
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CAPTCHAs make web sites awful to use, and waste the limited lifespans of billions of people.
There are other ways to manage bots.
Not easily, and not at the time, no, it really was a very easy way to quickly reduce bot problems at the time.
You'd get random spam for stuff that could flood your forums or etc, and setting up captcha had an extremely immediate and palpable effect on reducing the spam that came in from random bot farms and shit.
I can personally confirm that when I implemented captcha on my forums i maintained 14 years ago, it pretty substantially reduced spammers by a huge degree.
There's no point in arguing what once was. Things have changed. CAPTCHAs are now less effective, far more invasive, and for many people, far more troublesome.
Cling to them if you like. I no longer use them on any of my sites, because I care about my users.
I'm not a website administrator so I'm out of the loop. Other ways to manage bots? Like what?
What will be effective depends on the nature of the site and that of the bots causing trouble. For example, a forum can limit posting privileges until an account builds a reputation, a paid goods/services site can restrict access until a purchase is made, a web service can use revocable credentials, and a data download site can use rate limits. (That last one is actually useful in a variety of situations, and can be done at the network level instead of or in addition to the application level.)
There is no silver bullet, but there are lots of small measures that can be very effective when applied thoughtfully, without turning a site into a frustrating-to-use surveillance tool for Google at the expense of the humans who want to or have to use it.
Even a small, locally hosted, activate-only-once, simple image or text-based CAPTCHA would be preferable to the ones operated by third parties.
Thank you for the thorough reply!
So all I need to do to bot your sites is to farm accounts? Easy enough, people do that on Instagram at huge scales.
Good luck. You'll find that your farmed accounts can't do much of anything, and will be quickly and automatically deleted.