If GRM doesn't want to go to closed registration, then how about adding some questions as part of the sign up process?
1. What is THE car
2. What is a Canoe
3. What is What is the title of next years challenge
One word answers that anyone who has been looking at the board for 5 minutes should be able to figure out. Well, maybe it will be so successful that #2 will have to be changed!
I wouldn't have known any of those when I joined.
Hocrest
HalfDork
10/20/11 8:05 a.m.
N Sperlo wrote:
I wouldn't have known any of those when I joined.
+1
Maybe #3, but it took a month or two to figure out 1 and 2.
There's other ones besides annoying CAPTCHA. Some sites use pictures with things like "Select the Orange" or for GRM flavor "Select the gen I Miata"
The0retical wrote:
There's other ones besides annoying CAPTCHA. Some sites use pictures with things like "Select the Orange" or for GRM flavor "Select the gen I Miata"
I like this better.
I got no idea what a "canoe" is, and as far as I'm concerned THE car is my 2011 Mustang 5.0.
All good points. I hate CAPTCHA's, they're so good it nrmaly takes me a couple of attempts before I can get one right, and last time I checked I was a real human.
How about multiple choice then?
We've got plans in place for new user registration changes. It's the rest of the site that needs to be finished...
Patience, please. We're trying to get the new CMS site off the ground in the next 12-72 hours. The idea is to evaluate those changes and find ways to break it (in a lower population density environment) before unleashing these changes on the GRM site.
New users will have to endure the CAPTCHA challenge. Existing users won't(shouldn't) notice any difference at all.
Do they still ask who the publisher is and you have to mention Margies husbands real name?
Any single word answer questions or multiple choice questions will VERY quickly get figured out by bots. That's why captchas are good: they're different every single time.
Personally, I have no issue with captchas, and with something like reCaptcha, you're helping to translate old books.
There's always a "gimme another one" button on the side of a Captcha if you have no freakin' clue what you're looking at, the most I've ever had to hit that was twice.
And really, if it was just for sign-up, it would affect all of us exactly no times.
There are many versions of Captcha like products and I like all of them better than Captcha.
Captcha needs to be reset a dozen times before you can get a set of figures you can read 100% accurately.
Duke
SuperDork
10/20/11 9:04 a.m.
I don't really understand the hysteria over spam. It's annoying, yes. You see one, you click the little Exclamation Point button, the next staff member to come along deletes it. No heroics required.
Captcha makes sense to me for security... and I had no idea about the re captcha thing being translating old books and stuff... a quick look at I have few issues with re-captcha then any other that I tend to use... not that I have tons of issues with them... but when I was working tech support older folks had to run though them a few times to get them
Duke wrote:
I don't really understand the hysteria over spam. It's annoying, yes. You see one, you click the little Exclamation Point button, the next staff member to come along deletes it. No heroics required.
Having helped moderated small sites from my geekier MMO days, you would be surprised how fast it piles up. Even with a moderate level of CAPTCHA setup there were 30 or 40 threads a day that you need to review to ensure that it was spam then delete. We needed to jack up the CAPTHCA threshold pretty high to get around some of the more advanced bots which made it annoying for guild applicants.
I can't even imagine how time consuming a larger site with several thousand members could be. Though GRM is one of the more troll free boards I've had the pleasure of participating on.
Duke
SuperDork
10/20/11 9:18 a.m.
I've been an admin on a forum with over 125,000 members and millions of posts. I know how quickly it can stack up. What I'm referring to is here, where we are really not terribly troubled by it, yet people keep leaning on the staff to solve the problem, when in my eyes, it's not a huge issue.
Duke wrote:
I've been an admin on a forum with over 125,000 members and millions of posts. I know how quickly it can stack up. What I'm referring to is here, where we are really not terribly troubled by it, yet people keep leaning on the staff to solve the problem, whn in my eyes, it's not a huge issue.
kind of what I'm thinkin.
Duke wrote:
I've been an admin on a forum with over 125,000 members and millions of posts. I know how quickly it can stack up. What I'm referring to is here, where we are really not terribly troubled by it, yet people keep leaning on the staff to solve the problem, when in my eyes, it's not a huge issue.
I appreciate this attitude. Generally, it's more of an annoyance but sometimes they try to implement goofy scripts that can cause other troubles with the site as a whole.
Duke wrote:
I've been an admin on a forum with over 125,000 members and millions of posts. I know how quickly it can stack up. What I'm referring to is here, where we are really not terribly troubled by it, yet people keep leaning on the staff to solve the problem, when in my eyes, it's not a huge issue.
Oh granted if it's not broke don't fix it. Just making a general observation, there's no point in making admins do all the work to design a script or implement a complex registration scheme (time == money and I like an excellent publication) if all that needs to be done is remove a dozen or two threads requiring a couple minutes it isn't a big deal. When you end up with a gross of threads to delete every day some proactive thinking may be in order. Fortunately it isn't at that point yet (the unpaid intern can still handle it )
We are currently intern-less, but killing spam posts doesn't suck up an incredible amount of time. A systemic solution is coming soon, so there's really not a lot to argue about.
But if you do that, what will we waste our smarmy, sarcasm filled canoe comments on?
wbjones
SuperDork
10/21/11 4:54 a.m.
just when we thought we were safe here comes an shiny happy person named zibiwen