Bob: I agree, the captcha should be at the account-creation stage (if it’s not there already), and not at the individual posting level. I don’t think this will stop me (or anyone who is interested enough) from posting, but it does pose an additional barrier.
<offtopic>As for solving captchas, spammers have figured out how to solve them, not programmatically, but using social engineering and the oldest trick in the book: offer people porn in exchange. Slightly NSFW link: http://blog.trendmicro.com/captcha-wish-your-girlfriend-was-hot-like-me/
As for programmatic methods and text-based captchas (those that ask you a question to which arguably only a human could provide an answer), Wolfram Alpha doesn’t do too badly: http://joelvanhorn.com/2010/11/10/using-wolframalpha-to-hack-text-captcha/
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