Can we have a captcha on the forum?

Has there been any progress on this? I'm pretty sure I'm seeing spam every day now.

We have it working on the staging server with the caveat that it's not yet working with https, so in some browsers it will require the catpcha without showing it (which is quite annoying and could totally block a valid user from posting). 

unfortunately captcha  won't stop people posting

Would it be possible to give people a way to verify the registration to bypass the reputation restrictions?  Something where they can be vouched for by support or another member of the forum.

 I see a lot of people that need to post screen shots but can't until they increase their reputations.

We're working on requiring email validation again as a way to curb the spam. That would also mean that everyone that posts would, by nature of the requirement, have enough points to post screen shots. In the meantime, feel free to bring any specific cases to my attention as I will simply add points to their reputation to enable uploading their image (I do this whenever I notice it already). 

There have been more than 50 spam messages over the weekend.
This is making the forum unreadable.

I'm glad I didn't have to wait a week to post my first question.  I like Mr. Millard's idea of doing it based on reputation.

I agree, it was just a thought provoker.. sadly like everything, the few ruin it for the many.

A while back we dropped email verification for new users because if someone had a question, we didn't want to slow them down in getting it posted. The increased spam is certainly a downside of that decision. Captcha processing for very low reputation users will slow them down a little on their first few posts but given the increase in spam may be a reasonable middle ground.

Perhaps we can at least disallow posting by users who have not validated the email? I see the spammers/bots only have 0 or 1 reputation, which means they never validated.

+1.. please stop this garbage..