Comment 3 for bug 663011

Bat had an elegant solution which I think would be less unwieldy than most of the capcha thing's I've seen:

Bat: Current process: user types in message, hits send, CL sends the message to you.
New version: user types in message, hits send, CL checks to see if it has any URLs in it. If it doesn't, CL sends the message to you. Otherwise, CL forces the user to do some kind of humanity check, eg "What is 2+3?" or "Who was the king when Alfar and Elspeth were on the throne?".
Teffania: With a polite message saying soemthing like "because of the large ammount of spam sent to this adress, we wish to check you are actually a human."

Note: I think all the spam I've gotten has contained a url. Url's are very rare in legitimate fix me's but could occur.
So this should be mostly not be seen by users.

Bat: Can do the same for recommendations, tho they already have a silent fail if the user puts http or <a href into a message.
Teffania: yes, nice to not have recomendations silently fail because someone might want to link to the blog with pretty dresses the person made, etc.

Note this is a low priority bug - it's not a big issue at the moment, but is likely to continue getting worse.