What simple data mining question eliminates the spammers?
For several months, I was doing the tedious job of fighting link spam – manually removing 3-5 spammers per day who tried to register to KDnuggets Forums www.kdnuggets.com/forums in order to post there a link to their site selling you know what. Finally, I found a modification to forums code, which allowed me to ask new members an additional custom question. But what question would be simple enough so that the answer would be obvious or easy to find for any data miner, but would be a great challenge to any spammer? The answer should short and concise and should not be trivial to find with Google. Here is the question: What is the location of the next KDD conference? Hint: if you don’t know, you can find the answer on KDnuggets meetings page. Also, calls for papers for this conference are elsewhere in this issue of KDnuggets News. After 2 weeks, zero spammers have registered, but two real data miners have joined KDnuggets Forums. Thus I can allow simple user-email registration for KDnugg
