Help think of some Human Verification Questions

[fba827]

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?

If *that* level of question is getting beaten, then anything harder will turn away potential registrants.

(Though I suspect someone probably sets up the bot's account, but it is possible for a bot to break those questions since they have easy keywords... i.e. you ask a computer "how many ..." of anything and it will start spitting out numbers. ask a computer anything with the word president and it will probably spit out the current president or the first president, etc. and the hardest one is actually "dungeons and .." though i guess google does come up with dragons a lot (eventually, when you get past the pornography results)

The audience (and potential audience) on ENWorld is pretty much any age group, any educational level, any geographic location (though, admittedly, there probably is a spike in demographics skewed towards male, late20s-mid30s, u.s., college educated). So it's hard to find a common theme there to make accessible questions.


How about instead of making the questions harder, you simply rotate the questions around every day/week whatever (if there is an easy way to do that) out of a stock of similar-level questions such that if the questions are broken by a bot they can't keep generating as easily since the next time they try it will get a different group of questions.


(sorry, i know all that is a ramble - my point being, rather than changing the *difficulty* of the questions, is it possible to increase the pool of questions and have a random 3 pulled from there every time to be answered?)

 

[HolyMan]

WHAT is your Quest?

Or a picture thing LIKE Capcha that has a sentence like "Type in only the third word of this sentence". Spambots that do figure out what it says would likely type in the whole thing wheras a human reading the instructions properly would type in "Only".

I like this... Remember the test that told you to read everything before continuing and at the end it told you to ignore all the above questions.

Could you have something like that with say 6 questions and as soon as two are answered you know it is a bot.

The next to last question would say something like... Ignoring all above questions what is the answer to the one below?...

HM

 

[RangerWickett]

http://xkcd.com/810/

I'd post the actual comic, but it has profanity.

 

[darjr]

I think the problem is that it isn't a bot anymore. It's a system where by human beings answer the questions for the spammers.

So simple questions that those 'helpers' will probably have no way of knowing. Like 'Who is the owner of the site?' or 'What kind of die is in the logo?' might be better.

 

[TarionzCousin]

I think the problem is that it isn't a bot anymore. It's a system where by human beings answer the questions for the spammers.

So simple questions that those 'helpers' will probably have no way of knowing. Like 'Who is the owner of the site?' or 'What kind of die is in the logo?' might be better.

Brand new members probably wouldn't know the owner of the site, but they should recognize the die in the logo.

 

[Elephant]

Brand new members probably wouldn't know the owner of the site, but they should recognize the die in the logo.

Someone new to RPGs might not. You can't really make registration tests based on insider knowledge if you want to get more subscribers.

 

[jonesy]

I'm not so sure they would if they've never played D&D. The problem with game specific questions is that it makes it hard for new players to get in. As has already been said.

On the other side of the coin, it's an icosahedron. It might be easier for a spammer who knows basic geometry to crack, than for someone who's new to the d20.

Edit: ninja'd by the elephant.

 

[fba827]

Edit: ninja'd by the elephant.

that just sounds ..... funny and scary at the same time

(anyway, sorry for the tangent. we now return you to your regularly scheduled thread already in progress)