Has the 'Question and Answer Challenge' protection been hacked?

[bpn]

Last 3 days we have had lots of bot registrations. Luckily, so far, none have passed email validation.
Our forum is not in English or any other common language, so Q&A protection should be impossible to pass with bots.

[Ryan H.]

Try changing your question or questions and see if the issue persists. Perhaps a human completed the question and saved the answer for the bots.

[bpn]

Yes, I have done that now, but its unlikely that it's done by humans. I'm in western Europe, and the email addresses of our wannabe-members are from Russia and Poland.
Both questions and answers contained characters that's special to our language. If it was done by humans they would probably have completed the validation?

[bfarber]

Given that you both write the questions and the answers for the Q&A challenge, it's impossible for it to be "hacked" by bots. There are only a few possibilities:

1) Your question/answer pairs have not changed in a while, and thus the questions and answers were added to automatic registration programs
2) A human filled in those parts of the registration form (people get paid like $.01 USD per registration form they complete in some third world countries)
3) Your questions/answers are common dictionary questions that bots can automatically parse and respond to

There are few other possibilities really, and I'd lean towards #1 or #2 being the most likely case. Try changing the questions/answers on your site.

[Misi]

3) Your questions/answers are common dictionary questions that bots can automatically parse and respond to

Or mathematical such as:
Q : 5 + 4 equals
A: 9 (nine)

[bfarber]

Yes, that would fall under #3 above (in a slightly different manner, albeit).

[jackflash]

I changed my Q & A challenge to include numbers - both typed out and spelled out so that you cannot add them up unless you understand some basic English. For example: "If you have 1 pen, two erasures, 4 pencils and one piece of paper, how many total pieces would you have?" The easterners would guess 5 since they see and add the 1 + 4. This has worked well for us.

Just make sure your possible answers are:
5
Five
five

or whatever your numeric value total is.