You're right, it's only a solution for niche sites rather than ones aiming at all users. Obviously, Reddit/Facebook/Google/YouTube/whatever are out of luck here

You're right, it's only a solution for niche sites rather than ones aiming at all users. Obviously, Reddit/Facebook/Google/YouTube/whatever are out of luck here, their audience is basically 'everyone on the planet' and they don't have any real way to test that. And you've also got a point that a certain percentage of legitimate users would be pruned out by a simple, topical question. There are probably a few people who couldn't register on Wario Forums cause of this sort of thing, and there were probably a few who couldn't join my previous sites cause of it. So your questions would have to be very much tied to the audience. General gaming site? Asking who this is with a picture of Mario, Link, Pikachu or Sonic the Hedgehog would work pretty well. Niche site? A bit more obscure, to go with the audience likely to be visiting there. That said, I think a few things will need to kept in mind: 1. Firstly, a lot of niche sites already have fairly strict requirements to get in, and have a more drawn out approval process than the norm. For example, quite a few I know of have you required to post an intro in an 'approval' forum in order to get access to the rest of the site or server. So I suspect users on these sites may be more used to having to think/research the process to join a forum than those on Facebook. 2. To some degree, it also filters for people who are genuinely interested in the topic to a more than average degree, which may overlap well with 'people likely to stick around for the long run'. For example, the people likely to remember King K Rool's guises in Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 may be good users at DK Vine, someone who could identify Rawk Hawk or Flavio would be more likely to be a good Mario RPG forum member, etc. It's a bit like the comments I've heard about Ling's Cars... the only people who shop there really, really need a car. Actually, maybe a bit like Hacker News too. The people most likely to 'tolerate' the old school design here are well, web developers, old school hacker types, etc. Either way, it definitely all depends on how niche the site is.