Forum registration is too hard

[half]

I just received a very useful Sil bug report via email from someone who finished by saying:

I'd post all this in the relevant thread of the Angband Forums, but I
can't register there because it requires the answer to a secret question
that's written in Tolkienesque.

I think we need to change the question to make it easier, or to link to a page that explains it or something. I think even if it said:

Type the word "mellon" to enter

That would be enough to stop bots and still allow all the real people who want to join.

[pav]

But but but, think about the flavour!!

Nah seriously, I'm not opposed to changing the question - the answer to the old one leaked to bot owners already - but I'd like something a bit more colourful. Suggestions?

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by pav

But but but, think about the flavour!!

Nah seriously, I'm not opposed to changing the question - the answer to the old one leaked to bot owners already - but I'd like something a bit more colourful. Suggestions?

How about random basic calculus? (d100)+/-/*(d100). That should be easy for humans and difficult for bots. Of course something like 78*86 could be a bit hard to calculate in your head, but calculators exist for that.

[Nick]

Alive without breath,
As cold as death;
Never thirsty, ever drinking,
All in mail never clinking.

[HallucinationMushroom]

I had forgotten that one, I like it. The egg one is the one that always springs to my mind when recalling the riddle game.

The answer to yours was an alcoholic zombie postman, right?

[Nick]

Originally Posted by HallucinationMushroom

The answer to yours was an alcoholic zombie postman, right?

Sounds like a good idea for a unique...

[Seany C]

If we're doing new uniques, I'm still waiting for a variant to inroduce Ka-Ching, the Creeping Coin Lord:
"This creature is the epitome of all that is evil, in a pile of loose change.
Glittering with silver, gold and precious stones, it creeps forward on
thousands of legs like impending doom, ready to draw out your soul with its
unearthly jingling. Flee its wrath!"

[ekolis]

Originally Posted by half

I just received a very useful Sil bug report via email from someone who finished by saying:



I think we need to change the question to make it easier, or to link to a page that explains it or something. I think even if it said:



That would be enough to stop bots and still allow all the real people who want to join.

Yeah, seriously - if I hadn't already registered by the time this was implemented, I probably would never have registered, and I'd probably think Angband was for elitist Tolkien nerds!

[Derakon]

The difficulty with having a flavorful captcha, clearly, is that eventually the spambots figure it out and start getting through anyway. Which I find kind of odd; I'd expect them to not want to dedicate the effort when there's millions of forums out there. Oh well.

Perhaps we should go with something like KittenAuth? I don't know how difficult plugging in a new captcha system is, though.

EDIT: hm, KittenAuth seems to be defunct. Oh well. The basic idea was that you have a bunch of images of various animals and you ask the user to identify a specific animal type (e.g. "which of these images is a panda?"). Computers are terrible at image recognition but humans are great at it.

[ekolis]

Besides, I'm sure that in the time since KittenAuth has been developed, at least one AI has been developed that can recognize kittens...

(Of course, if AI's can recognize kittens now, maybe we can distract all the spambots with lolcats? )