The captcha with registration was fine, even an activation e-mail to verify that I did indeed submit a real e-mail address and then went and read it to activate my account.
But the activation quiz? Really? I had to google the year Albert Einstein died, and then create a java program, paste the code in and print out the result, and then do some greatest common divisor math?
I made it through your series of hoops, Java-Gaming.org, but the next 1000 people probably won’t bother to.
I think it’s ment to not only filter out those bots,
it’s ment to filter out those guys coming from minecraft, guys think they love gaming and therefore registrate, etc.
It’s ment to only let the programmers of the registrators enter.
Also, the result for all questions is the same, isn’t it?
It’s a pretty active board despite all the hoops, with experience at all levels and ages. If SMF weren’t otherwise so wretched at anti-spam measures, they could perhaps be a bit more lenient.
Anyway, if you don’t have a java scratchpad project for running code like that, you can always use another language. I used scala (to verify my guess)
And people giving away the answers are probably just ensuring the next iteration will be harder
You seem to assume that the activation quiz was put in place purely to annoy new members to no end. For our own amusement. To see them fail. You might want to take a step back, and wonder why we would possibly put so much effort into raising the bar for new registrations. If it wasn’t obvious yet, it’s because we were dealing with spambots, and SMF (forum software) fails to stop them.
[x]So we added a 1-question-quiz about Einstein, problem solved right? No, human spammers blasted right through and littered the forum with filth.
[x]So we made a 2-question-quiz, with a code-sample, problem solved right? No, the code sample ended up in google, with the answer included. Human spammers got in and dumped their crap on the forum. That was rather unexpected… Why are these spammers so determined? Or in other words: WTF!
[x]The solution was to generate the code sample, by bruteforcing all possible combinations, and picking pairs that yielded the right answer. Finally the human spammers gave up, until they started to get through… seriously, they actually adjusted the code a bit and compiled java to litter our forum with their spam.
[x]As a last resort I decided to add some psychological warfare, by asking a seemingly hard question, so that they wouldn’t even bother.
[x]Success. Finally.
Last month we had 9500 registrations, 2700 posts and about 90 actual new members. I hope this shows what a torrent of spam we are blocking. And still we have a huge influx of newbies, on a perfectly clean forum, mind you. That it filters out clueless newbies is a bonus. This is Java Gaming, not Java for Dummies, so I don’t mind people failing to join the community if they cannot compile code, or do trivial math (or notice the pattern).
TL;DR: it works out great, and many newbies actually say they liked the trivia quiz. You’re the first to complain to this extend.
Hehe when I first joined I was like, “Woh kinds extreme to join a forum” but it only took me 5 minutes to do it and then was like w/e. Really google can do almost the entire thing for you so I don’t see what the big deal is.
Hm. Interesting story. The spam bot protection is obvious. I had no idea that it would take that much to give you the proper screening you’re looking for. I just thought y’all were being elitist d*cks.
I came across this site and thought it was pretty cool, and I’m not really a Java guy either. I lean towards C++ or ActionScript when I can.
I browse tons of coding/gaming sites and never register, but I actually wanted to join this one. That’s why I was so ticked when I realized what I had to go through to sign up cause I don’t have a Java IDE at work and I didn’t know if the same hashCode function could be found in other APIs. Luckily I found a live Java compiler on the internet that doesn’t require any downloading or anything and it worked like a charm.
If SMF could use Akismet, then the spam problem would probably be controllable to the point where our excuse wouldn’t be good anymore and we’d be revealed for the elitist dicks we really are
Seriously, for all WordPress’s other failings as another monstrous PHP turd, the Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins are really really really good.
I am new here and just absolved the “trivia”. First I though that the registration is to complicated, too. I read the activation email on my android phone and tried to do the trivia from there. This is just a pain. You need to run the code and I had no developer tools on the phone, so I had to do it on my desktop system, ok.
I don’t read this thread completely, but this is my opinion:
Maybe that would be a trade-off that makes registration a little more comfortable for experienced programmers and still reaching the goal to filter users. Just a proposal.
I kindly suggest to read this post then, and you’ll see that we at the very least need (randomly) generated code snippets. It also must not be easily portable to javascript.
Any suggestions on how to combine that with executing the code in your head?
OK, now I see, I underestimated the effort that spammers perform to get into this site. ^^ Sry, not to read the whole thread right away, but don’t worry, most of the time I do.
I did not try to become an SCJP but in some of the test questions there is a Java code snippet and you have to analyse it and answer what’s happening when trying to compile and execute the code. I think it’s multiple choice where multiple answers might be correct. The offered answers on one and the same question might look like this:
[] results in value A
[] results in value B
[] throws MyException at …
[] doesn’t compile because of reason x
[_] doesn’t compile because of reason y
Sometimes the task gets really hard, e.g. there are multiple nested for loops in the snippet with unexpressive variable names.
Anyway this is just an idea. I don’t know all the details and can’t do a final judgement. Additionally IMHO if the spammer puts enough effort into it, he will succeed in solving the CAPTCHA or whatever. For example he might use a program to copy the snippet compile and run it and use the result as the answer input.
