You can brute force a multiple choice question in a few attempts…
I have an idea - generate working code, make purposeful mistakes (that don’t make code less understandable - errors like using variable created inside loop outside this loop) and let user fix code to make it working.
there are many ways to fix broken code, and the verifier code isn’t exactly smart, nor going to compile code snippets, and executing them.
[badjoke]
Face recognition.
[/badjoke]
Well IMHO if it’s too hard for human, spambot too. The current way is pretty balanced.
The code snippet you’re all talking about is a String hashCode right? That doesn’t require a Java compiler to solve. The math is really simple. The only hard part is converting characters to their numerical value using an ASCII table.
Edit: You should never use multiple choice questions to attempt to address automated spam. The idea behind an image CAPTCHA (in absence of OCR) is that an attacker has a 1 in 26^n chance. Even a four character string results in a huge number of possibilities. The problem with multiple choice is that instead of a .0002 percent chance of succeeding, an unintelligent bot (with no informed guesses or web searching) could get in 25% of the time and there’s a relatively high chance that a human could get it wrong, too.
Wt.? You don’t even need to? (At least in java, but its exactly the same in most other languages:)
[icode]
String str = “ABC”;
System.out.println(“ASCII from “” + str + “”:”);
for (int i = 0; i < str.length(); i++) {
System.out.println(( (int) str.charAt(i) ));
}
[/icode]
The point was that you did not have a Java compiler you could use. You could go to Wikipedia, solve the first question in 5 seconds, solve the second in 60 by using Wikipedia again and a calculator program, and probably take a short time on the last part, too.
You must be kidding, trolling or just horribly misinformed.
Once spammers solve it once, they can spam and spam until they get IP banned. Then they could go and tell their spammer friends the answer and to go do the same.
Good thing spammers don’t have friends. ;D
Sorry, misspelled, bots. (Bots creating lots of accounts)
Wait, which word did you mis-spell?
Anyway, yes it would be simple for a bot to create heaps of accounts IF the creator of the bot knew the answer.
I recently did the quiz myself and I have to say I really enjoyed it! It was just a little bit sad that the last question was trivial. About a week ago I learned the Extended Euclidean algorithm at Univerity … :-X
The quiz is just right 
It even entertains people ;D
Why all the talk about something that doesn’t seem to be broken. Think about something else.
Judging from some posts here, the activation quiz should be a tad harder 
Ha! :persecutioncomplex:
+1 for harder quiz. At least JGO will be famous because of it ;D
Well that has to be the most different and strange way I’ve verified I’m not a bot! lol!
Kudo’s to who ever thought of it!
Hi All,my first post btw
I remember when I was even smaller, I couldn’t register to these forums because I wasn’t experienced enough to solve the various problems I had to solve to register. That part probably saved you all a month or so of newbie questions whose solutions were all readily available on the internet.
Lol, I just used Google to find this page, where everyone was saying the answers out loud…
Don’t get rid of me; I won’t spam, I promise! I’m just very appreciative of many members’ works…
And yes, I could’ve very well just entered that into Eclipse and pushed run, but I was lazy…