Help think of some Human Verification Questions

[Morrus]

It seems that spambots are getting cleverer - they're able to answer our current human verification questions on registration, which are:

• How many legs does a dog have?
• Dungeons and WHAT?
• What's the last name of the current US President?

So we need some new questions - ones which are harder for a bot to answer, but easy for a human. They need to have a definite, single-word answer.

Any ideas?

 

[Dice4Hire]

Hmm.

Since I barely count as human, this is pretty hard

What famous ship sank in 1912?
The two most famous colas are Coca-cola and?
What famous thing did Rubik invent (shape)?
What does WOTC call their online service? (dunno about this one)

Something like this?

 

[jonesy]

reCAPTCHA?

 

[Morrus]

reCAPTCHA?

Is even worse. Using reCAPTCHA we get tons of spammers break through. The problem with that is that spammers now outsource the puzzles to humans via malware and the like, and actual people are solving them, returning the answer to the spamserver, which then enters it in the registration field.

I've just tried a new one called keyCAPTCHA - we'll see how that goes. They say that because of the way it's set up it can't be outsourced (there's no field to enter anything - it's just a puzzle with movable pieces).

 

[jonesy]

Google research on CAPTCHA's said that the best ones are relative. For instance, it asks you to mark where 'up' is in a picture, without the picture having any classical ups, like skies or faces. And you could obfuscate it with upside down text.

But those also turned out to be really hard for humans in many cases. So, yeah.

 

[RangerWickett]

"Go to this webpage and tell us an antonym of the third word."

 

[El Mahdi]

Human Verification Questions

"You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. You reach down and flip the tortoise over on it's back. The tortoise lays on it's back, baking in the hot sun, beating it's legs trying to turn itself over...but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why aren't you helping?"



(Sorry. Couldn't help myself...)

 

[pawsplay]

It seems that spambots are getting cleverer - they're able to answer our current human verification questions on registration, which are:

• How many legs does a dog have?
• Dungeons and WHAT?
• What's the last name of the current US President?

So we need some new questions - ones which are harder for a bot to answer, but easy for a human. They need to have a definite, single-word answer.

Any ideas?

Well, I think one strategy would be to make them sort of specific to this site so that the databank o' spam doesn't get wise to questions posed on several sites. But that's potentially tricky.

• Setting aside the issue of class, what is your race?
• What world is this? (Type letters as one word)

 

[ggroy]

Use a math question?

ie. "What is the first derivative of x, with respect to x?"

 

[jonesy]

"What is the first derivative of x, with respect to x?"

Hmm. 1?