The anti-spam Java question is still too intense, in my opinion. I come with a use case.
This is after I told a friend to go to JGO to get answers to his Java questions. He’s at the point where he asked me why his program doesn’t run, with an error saying there is no main method. Anybody who is a complete newb cannot join the forum. Too inhibitive.
lol, you think it would be a pretty simple task if you had the tools available to solve each problem (a search engine and a java compiler). However I could understand why some may be intimidated by such tasks when trying to enter a forum.
Isn’t that the point? They can’t go into java gaming if they can’t even write a main method 
The current activation page achieves the following things:
Maybe it’s harsh, but it’s exactly how I like it.
I am kinda with Riven on this. We don’t want every 15 year old who has decided to make millions on a minecraft clone coming and asking dumb questions all the time.
The conversations go something like this.
“Help me”
-"? help with what"
“writing java”
-“you mean to program”
“no i want to write a game”
-“well you start with a game loop or something like that”
“how, can you show me code”
–shows a pesudo code snipit.
“that doesn’t work, what kinda game is that”
Time passes
“You hate helping people, why are you even here. I want help. I don’t want to be told to use google or read a book”
whats wrong with 15 year olds? I’m 15
You are not every 15 year old. Sure anyone who wants to really learn, all good. But most just want a million dollar game to their name without any hard work. Or even fun work. Or fun hard work. whatever.
He meant 14 year olds.
Believe it or not, I have seen 12 year olds!
Well, I guess I am overruled. 
Yeah, he doesn’t know how to run a main method, because he has only just started learning to program. But I could also see people with similar issues who come from very different language backgrounds - in many languages you can simply type code snippets into the command line and you’re off and running. I think pretty much everyone more or less knows how to code in C-based languages so this probably isn’t much of an issue, but still. I can think of types of people who don’t fit your spammer/noob scenario but still might have trouble getting in. For example, somebody who is an experienced programmer but has never used Java, therefore doesn’t know the best way to run a program. They would have to spend a reasonable amount of time Googling it and maybe getting an IDE to run the snippet, etc. Most people would likely be turned away.
I just think that, in games and forums and elsewhere, the less friction you have to entry the better.
Although I personally dont care what you guys do. I think it wouldnt be a horrible thing to make the code a little easier to simply figure it out by looking at it. As currently its very difficult to do that.
Simply copying/pasting the entire questions individually into google.
1st response gives you answer for first
8th google post gives you the answer for the second question. (at least for me, its a thread discussing it on another forum)
Though they are both the exact same answer 
And as some people discussed, Yes, some people may not know enough to run it in a java program. But technically isn’t this a java gaming board, not an “intro java” board? Gaming although people often want it to be, isn’t necessarily the first thing you should be doing in programming.
And as delt0r pointed out. I feel there would be a lot lot more people asking the same questions and often wanting a lot more then they are going to work for. I have been programming now for over a year and I still continue to under-estimate things.
edit: there are also over 20,000 members? how many of those subscribed after the increased anti spam measure?
Thanks for the heads up. I’m bruteforcing code snippets now
about 400 new members
That’s not too bad. Do you have any idea how many people fail the new account screen? I’d be interested to know. It also might be cool to have a link there if you fail a bunch of times, where you can post or email somebody or something.
I dunno, I just like having analytics.
about 400 of 12,600 registrations succeeded.
To give you an idea of how insane that is, in the same period there were 22,200 posts on JGO.
just signed up after looking around the forum. The code snippet wasn’t hard to figure out. As simple as using notepad and command prompt. Took about a minute. The last line of the code snippet [ return a; ] gives it out as of what you should do.
I actually liked the mini-challenge, hah. :clue:
Thanks
I actually noticed quite an increase in spammer registrations in the last 6 weeks.
I just bruteforced all valid combinations (1301 out of 26^6) that result in the same answer (took >20min on my quadcore).
From now on a google query won’t give you the answer anymore.
Unless by some chance you get the same code snippet as before 
(unless you removed those combinations)
Well I didn’t actually think of referring to google. 
I started a test class, put the code snippet into a method. Started a main() method and called the other method from there and than printed it out on screen. Really simple :-\
So wait, you reinforced the verification page? the Answer shouldn’t be the same though as people doing a “google query” could still try to plug in the answer from the old code snippet just for the heck of it. Making the new code snippet challenge kinda pointless…