Registration Activation Quiz

General Discussions
#61

Ok, let me fix the analogy, just for the sake of accuracy. We can do stepwise corrections if you want, until it matches the actual situation in every single aspect and stops being an analogy :wink:

Let’s say…
It’s like the difference between saying:

  • “Quick, jump into the pool, that’s standard security procedure against fire around here!”
    or
  • “Quick, jump into the pool, the house is on fire again (and we prepared the pool especially for such occasion. Also there will be towels once you’re iside)”

;D

[quote] It could be seen as the community making you earn your membership
[/quote]
Wait the moment… I thought that was one of those things that you DON’T want “newbies” to think?

#62

That’s a bad analogy. The activation quiz is the way it is for the sake of the forum and not for the user. I think potential members’ reactions towards the activation quiz says more about them than the forum they’re signing up for. If one is easily annoyed/offended by something like that, an attitude check is in order… not a re-evaluation of the activation quiz. It could be seen as the community making you earn your membership with a not-so-difficult test as much as the way you saw it as jumping through hoops.

#63

Ok, let me fix the analogy, just for the sake of accuracy. We can do stepwise corrections if you want, until it matches the actual situation in every single aspect and stops being an analogy :wink:

Let’s say…
It’s like the difference between saying:

  • “Quick, jump into the pool, that’s standard security procedure against fire around here!”
    or
  • “Quick, jump into the pool, the house is on fire again (and we prepared the pool especially for such occasion. Also there will be towels once you’re iside)”

;D

[quote] It could be seen as the community making you earn your membership
[/quote]
Wait the moment… I thought that was one of those things that you DON’T want “newbies” to think?

#64

[quote=“jam”]

[quote=“jam”]

[quote=“jam”]
Taking your own impression and/or reasoning and projecting it on the general population to make a point… From what I hear, both in this thread and in my PMs, is that the people that come through, are usually amused by the quiz. Surely this is a biased selection, but it’s not all the doom and gloom you portray it to be.

On a side note: do you complain at websites using ReCaptcha? The only reason you accept those monstrosities is that you’re conditioned to use them. They offer a horrible user experience to the target audience and let a steadily increasing amount of fancy pants bots through. If you think that the quiz is worse than a re-captcha, we’ll have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.

Given your apparent extensive background in social behavior (and odd analogies), this seems out of place. Let’s add a poor analogy to the bunch and say that one day I don’t want red haired tall girls in my office, so on the door, I’ll put up an elaborate text describing how red haired tall girls are denied access because they are morally impure, smelly and generally misinformed. Guess who will be trying to get in no matter what and ruin the place, stealing my sticky notes… pissed off red haired tall girls! Why? Because I was more or less taunting them.

I’m not going to taunt human spammers, by describing how much trouble they caused and which measures we put in place to keep them out, how they worked around it and how we countered their tactics. It will give them an incentive to prove me wrong, either by compiling the code snippet, or being a tad more nasty, like attacking the server which a script kiddie could do by accidently pressing a button. These are not nice people, and generally best ignored, not taunted and not even mentioned explicitly, they’ll just see a simple page, think ‘holy cow!’ and close the browser tab. Just the way I like it.

Given that my PHP skills do not allow me to show the ‘so sorry’ paragraph only to non-spammers, I’m forced to show everybody the same page, which given the reasons posted above, is rather terse.

#65

Wait the moment… I thought that was one of those things that you DON’T want “newbies” to think?
[/quote]
I just signed-up last week and that’s how I saw it and I liked it that way.

I saw it as a challenge and I accepted it. For me it shed this forum in a positive light.

#66

Yup ^

I recently joined a couple weeks ago, and I thought it was perfectly fair. The quiz took me about an hour to figure out. The quiz itself is easy, but difficult :slight_smile: It’s kind of like a maze that is incredibly straightforward, but looks really hard.

Yeah, I know who you are, people googling the answers who somehow found this page… I’m watching you.

#67

[quote=“jam,post:48,topic:40196”]

[quote=“jam,post:53,topic:40196”]

[quote=“jam,post:58,topic:40196”]
Taking your own impression and/or reasoning and projecting it on the general population to make a point… From what I hear, both in this thread and in my PMs, is that the people that come through, are usually amused by the quiz. Surely this is a biased selection, but it’s not all the doom and gloom you portray it to be.

On a side note: do you complain at websites using ReCaptcha? The only reason you accept those monstrosities is that you’re conditioned to use them. They offer a horrible user experience to the target audience and let a steadily increasing amount of fancy pants bots through. If you think that the quiz is worse than a re-captcha, we’ll have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.

Given your apparent extensive background in social behavior (and odd analogies), this seems out of place. Let’s add a poor analogy to the bunch and say that one day I don’t want red haired tall girls in my office, so on the door, I’ll put up an elaborate text describing how red haired tall girls are denied access because they are morally impure, smelly and generally misinformed. Guess who will be trying to get in no matter what and ruin the place, stealing my sticky notes… pissed off red haired tall girls! Why? Because I was more or less taunting them.

I’m not going to taunt human spammers, by describing how much trouble they caused and which measures we put in place to keep them out, how they worked around it and how we countered their tactics. It will give them an incentive to prove me wrong, either by compiling the code snippet, or being a tad more nasty, like attacking the server which a script kiddie could do by accidently pressing a button. These are not nice people, and generally best ignored, not taunted and not even mentioned explicitly, they’ll just see a simple page, think ‘holy cow!’ and close the browser tab. Just the way I like it.

Given that my PHP skills do not allow me to show the ‘so sorry’ paragraph only to non-spammers, I’m forced to show everybody the same page, which given the reasons posted above, is rather terse.

#68

I don’t see why this topic is still active. This is a programming forum, and that’s a very very basic programming question. Deal with it.

#69

Wait the moment… I thought that was one of those things that you DON’T want “newbies” to think?
[/quote]
I just signed-up last week and that’s how I saw it and I liked it that way.

I saw it as a challenge and I accepted it. For me it shed this forum in a positive light.

#70

Yup ^

I recently joined a couple weeks ago, and I thought it was perfectly fair. The quiz took me about an hour to figure out. The quiz itself is easy, but difficult :slight_smile: It’s kind of like a maze that is incredibly straightforward, but looks really hard.

Yeah, I know who you are, people googling the answers who somehow found this page… I’m watching you.

#71

I don’t see why this topic is still active. This is a programming forum, and that’s a very very basic programming question. Deal with it.

#72

That’s an absolutely valid point to justify the decision.

I’d still guess, that the absence of an explanation is a lot more “taunting” - or more of an incentive to unleash spam (or other unwanted behaviour) than a clearer explanation would be. Discrimination based on behaviour - especially if it’s widely believe to be destructive - is usually a rather small source of negative emotions compared to on the other hand perceived discrimination based on “capabilities” or seemingly unnecessary “bossing around of someone in an inferior position” - both of which can easily make even unaffected bystanders uncomfortable. But there’s really just no way to predict that for sure - partly because we don’t know who exactly is responsible for the spam… so I guess “not wanting to taunt spammers further” is an absolutely valid point to justify the decision against a detailed explanation ;).

[quote] people that come through, are usually amused by the quiz. Surely this is a biased selection, but it’s not all the doom and gloom you portray it to be.
[/quote]
The selection isn’t only biased - it’s strongly systematically confounded. To stay with my theme of inadequate analogies: “It’s like making a telephone survey to ask people whether they like participating in telephone surveys. Wow, almost everyone loves it!”. Which is the main reason why I wanted to point it out - it’s just one of those things that are usually really hard to see/understand from the perspective of the “in-group”. Didn’t want to sound “gloomy-doomy” thought - any potentially present apocalyptic undertones are entirely due to my weird english :smiley:

#73

The selection isn’t only biased - it’s strongly systematically confounded. To stay with my theme of inadequate analogies: “It’s like making a telephone survey to ask people whether they like participating in telephone surveys. Wow, almost everyone loves it!”.
[/quote]
That’s where your reasoning is flawed. It should be: “Wow, almost everybody participates!” If you’d ask people whether they truly liked it, you’d get different numbers as most people are polite not to hang up immediately once they realize it’s a survey. If you’d record people making positive statements during the survey, regarding said survey without being asked on the matter, the numbers would be even lower, and merely biased, as opposed to ‘strongly systematically confounded’.

#74

If you don’t like the quiz, leave.

See if we care.

#75

That’s an absolutely valid point to justify the decision.

I’d still guess, that the absence of an explanation is a lot more “taunting” - or more of an incentive to unleash spam (or other unwanted behaviour) than a clearer explanation would be. Discrimination based on behaviour - especially if it’s widely believe to be destructive - is usually a rather small source of negative emotions compared to on the other hand perceived discrimination based on “capabilities” or seemingly unnecessary “bossing around of someone in an inferior position” - both of which can easily make even unaffected bystanders uncomfortable. But there’s really just no way to predict that for sure - partly because we don’t know who exactly is responsible for the spam… so I guess “not wanting to taunt spammers further” is an absolutely valid point to justify the decision against a detailed explanation ;).

[quote] people that come through, are usually amused by the quiz. Surely this is a biased selection, but it’s not all the doom and gloom you portray it to be.
[/quote]
The selection isn’t only biased - it’s strongly systematically confounded. To stay with my theme of inadequate analogies: “It’s like making a telephone survey to ask people whether they like participating in telephone surveys. Wow, almost everyone loves it!”. Which is the main reason why I wanted to point it out - it’s just one of those things that are usually really hard to see/understand from the perspective of the “in-group”. Didn’t want to sound “gloomy-doomy” thought - any potentially present apocalyptic undertones are entirely due to my weird english :smiley:

#76

The selection isn’t only biased - it’s strongly systematically confounded. To stay with my theme of inadequate analogies: “It’s like making a telephone survey to ask people whether they like participating in telephone surveys. Wow, almost everyone loves it!”.
[/quote]
That’s where your reasoning is flawed. It should be: “Wow, almost everybody participates!” If you’d ask people whether they truly liked it, you’d get different numbers as most people are polite not to hang up immediately once they realize it’s a survey. If you’d record people making positive statements during the survey, regarding said survey without being asked on the matter, the numbers would be even lower, and merely biased, as opposed to ‘strongly systematically confounded’.

#77

@jam: It seems clear that the activation quiz won’t change and there won’t be an explanation put on there like you suggested. I think it’s time to let go of the issue and move on… :wink:

#78

If you don’t like the quiz, leave.

See if we care.

#79

An if it does change it will only get harder.

#80

@jam: It seems clear that the activation quiz won’t change and there won’t be an explanation put on there like you suggested. I think it’s time to let go of the issue and move on… :wink: