Question: **What mechanisms do you know that prevent your site from being abused by anonymous spammers.**

For example, let's say that I have a site where people can vote something. But I *don't* want someone to spam something all the way to the top. So I found (a) creating an account and only allowed to vote once and (b) CAPTCHA to decrease spam. What other methods do you know and how good do they work?

Answer: 
![alt text](https://i.stack.imgur.com/X11ol.png)

From [xkcd](http://xkcd.com/233/)
Charge for votes, like they do on some television "talent" shows, and get spammed all the way to the bank!

Seriously, this is a really tough problem, and someday (maybe soon, if you listen to Ray Kurzweil), computers will do testing to screen out humans. The answers I'm adding to the list have obvious drawbacks, but just for the sake of enumeration: moderation (have humans do the testing), and IP-based tracking (limit the number of votes from a host).