Drop captcha - instead more thoroughly check new members?

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The nuisance of Captcha is a common cause for complaint. I haven't had anything but either a 'post a reply' loop or an error message in place of the image and box for about 24 hours. I'm trying to keep things short and quick, no quotes, so it doesn't get set off.

Yet, spammers be spamming. There's obviously a problem with a system that stops sincere members from posting, but lets spammers spam.

Would it be possible to drop post-captcha and instead more thoroughly check out new members? I just started a registration, and see there's a captcha there. Perhaps also require a few words from the applicant as to why they want to join, to double check their humanness? A question based on basic reading comprehension - 'Jane has two apples. Liz has three apples. In word form, how many apples do they have together?' kind of thing.

(I'm just stealing securty things I've seen on other forums I've signed up to, where the anti-spam checks were front-loaded at registration rather than throughout the site)

Perhaps with more restrictions on what can/can't be posted until after x number of posts?

I realize WP's infrastructure may not be up to it, but one technique I've seen work counts the flags and if a post is flagged X times, it is quarantined. If X number of posts from a user are quarantined, the user is quarantined for admin inspection.

Good ideas. I think we should have members have to write something about themselves before they are allowed to post. Moderators could grant posting privileges to legit-looking members and ban spammers before they could post.

One sometime used approach elsewhere is to limit new posters to no more then three or four posts per day for the first twenty or thirty posts.

It shouldn't be a general post wall. If there has to be a there it should be a phpBB extension. It is interfering with the function of the forum.

I have made phpBB extensions and contributed to forum software.

User that have been here a while don't deserve this level of interference.

It hasn't blocked spam or load issues. Some anti-DOS protection from cloudflare is ok, but this not a good approach.

WP/Alex needs proper advice.

My experience is any negative feedback gets abused.

The captcha is not for manual spam. It is a crude cloufloare firewall rule.

A custom extension can be made for the actual form with tick captcha. phpBB 3 is symfony based and and is extensible.

However it should apply to users who have been here for months or years.

There are configuration options that the owner of this site can modify.

Last night only 1 out of 5 of my comments ever made it through despite repeated attempts to get past captcha. I posted a small handful so a fair number were blocked. Most had no links or other BBCode, nor was there a correlation between new posts & replies. I flushed cookies & cache, I switched browsers, I switched from Linux to Windows. Nothing helped. I finally gave up and went to bed. This is getting stupid. What, exactly is gained by going through Cloudflare? It's not a full on cache server & the anti spam functionality of Captcha is ineffective.

Update: Whoooo-hooo! I'm 2 for 2 posted messages actually getting through today! Also, it makes me sad that I have to celebrate this.

Update2: ratio is down to 50-50. Newest corellation: 6 lines, w/ no non-alpha characters made it through. 8 lines did not, repeatedly and with or without non-alpha.

Yeah, I know. Tilting at windmills...

The configuration setting should be to turn off this section of the cloudflare firewall. It is not fit for purpose.

It is common for admins turn on all most of the setting when they are not sure which settings will be useful.

phpBB extention is the right solution.

I had issues with quoted posts but this may be coincidence.