Skills and Macroing

Creating a design that allows characters to have skills, but does not drive players to AFK macro has been a major goal for me. It is such a high priority, that removing skills altogether is still a consideration for the design. However, skills are still important to me, so I am going to try everything possible to keep them in the game.

To combat macroing, I have read about, and come up with a few ideas.

• CAPTCHA - I know what you're thinking, and I completely agree with you. How lame would it be for you to have to type in random characters every so often while you're mining or fishing? Although it would be terrible, there are a few games that employ this method. I just think we can do better.
• Player Policing - This involves a player going up to another and "tapping" on his shoulder. If the other player does not respond within a time-frame, then they must be macroing, so they are free game to kill. Personally, I'm not a big fan of this because I walk away from the computer a lot while I'm playing games, so sometimes I can't respond in time.
• Free-for-all PvP - While this may solve the problem in some cases, it is not ideal, because a lot of the time, even if you want to play a "realistic" sandbox MMO where you can do whatever you want, sometimes you just want to relax. I don't even know why I listed this, because it's not something I will consider doing, since I believe in safe zones.
• Interactivity/Minigames - This is the most promising idea I've come up with, though I'm sure it is not a new idea. It needs to be "fun", but not require a whole lot of thought or focus. For mining and lumberjacking, I was thinking of something like Fable II, where a slider bounces back and forth and you have to press the button at the right time. For herbalism maybe something like Thief III's lockpicking, where you have to twist and align roots to dig out. I'm not too worried about fishing or cooking since those will be secondary skills, but if the system was in, why not come up with something small? It would be nice to get anyone's feedback on this idea.
• Time-based - Just like EVE online, you set a skill to train, and wait, even while offline. This isn't a bad system, but I would prefer something a little more interactive. And why not just have both? Maybe you can set a skill to train before you log out and your character can study it while you're offline. Things like hunting, mining, fishing, etc could even collect a few resources or cash at the same time.