off the top of my head, i would create a custom captcha system on the primary router, but i would definitely not used that crap captcha stuff that is all over the web where you have to click on all bicycles or boats or airplanes, etc, omg.

a basic yet effective captcha could be something as simple as this:

it is now six hours before midnight, what time will it be in fifteen minutes? [] 6:10pm [] 8:30am [] 6:15pm

mary has four dogs. does mary have more than five dogs? []yes []no

i dont know, that is just off the top of my head.. but it shouldnt be that difficult to come up with a captcha system that would be simple for a user to pass thru, but would be very difficult to automate and impossible for a bot to break.

the captcha system should be something that you implement in-house that is a part of your website system, and not something that you have to pay for from an external company.

cookies can come in a few different forms, for all practical purposes..

1) industry standard cookies that are held by a browser and passed back and forth between the browser and the server.

2) as a variable that can be passed from browser to server for the duration of the browsing session.. these can be passed as either a POST or GET variable.

btw, i learned to write sockets code in C language by reading beej's guide to network programming.. it is much more pleasant to write such things on a linux box, btw..

https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/html/