I was in a similar discussion on the CB as well (but not one where anyone offered votes... sniff) and we came up with the following: (apologies to the various people on the CB that day, /msg me and Ill credit you)

The idea was to have a nodelet that presented a generated sentence in PNG or JPG or GIF form dynamically, put it through something gimplike to prevent OCR bots and then display it to the user. The user would have to enter the sentence (or randomly chosen words, whatever) into a textbox to activate the ability to vote for say the next hour. By doing this intelligently it should prevent pretty much any bot around from getting access (and if it could figure it out then maybe it _deserves_ to vote :-)

The concensus was though that despite the fact it might work in general it wouldnt prevent anyone really malicious as they could just log in their votebots by hand and then sic them on some unsuspecting guru that they had decided to loathe that day. The other issue was that perhaps it would annoy the hell out of the community, (the non-asshole non-votebot types).

My response to the first one is that despite the fact that professionals will always be able to steal my bike (they could raid my company at gunpoint and steal it that way if they really wanted) I still carry a lock, and I _always_ lock my bike. My response to the second point is a bit simpler:good point...

Anyways, since you started this off..

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)