Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

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Myria
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Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by Myria »

The anti-spam question I first got when registering was "what feature of the 6502 did Ricoh not implement on the NES?". The answer I gave, "_____ flag", wasn't accepted.

Melissa

[note: post modified by admin for security/obscurity]
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by Drew Sebastino »

That's a pretty cruel first question regardless. Mine asked what the name of the NES's "pad" controller is.
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Memblers
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by Memblers »

Looks like it was expecting 'mode' rather than flag, thanks for pointing that out. I've added that as a possible answer now. But now I don't know if I should hide this thread or edit your post so a spammer doesn't Google search the exact wording of the question. :lol: Kind of an unavoidable situation. Well, you can edit your post if you want, or I'll come back this weekend if I don't forget and hide the thread.

Espozo: Looks like that one isn't on there anymore.

edit: decided to just get paranoid and edit part of your post already. Not likely it would matter, but might as well.
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rainwarrior
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by rainwarrior »

Is that question something a new user would be expected to know? It seems like a rather advanced bit of trivia to me.
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koitsu
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by koitsu »

The entire point of the questions is to act as a deterrent for human beings hired to do spamming of forums. It's not foolproof, but it works fairly well.

There are entire companies dedicated to this task. They speak/understand English, can bypass general captchas (because those are just intended to stop robots/software, not humans), do mathematics questions, and for everything else will Google search as they come across them. These places are *much less likely* to bother a forum where they're forced to try and dig up "semi-obscure" questions about, say, a retro video game console. The people visiting this forum, in most cases, are people who want to be involved with NES (or some form of retro console) development, and are more likely to be legitimate.

We would rotate the questions out whenever we'd get a large number of spammers showing up on the forum, combined with me adding some circumvention techniques so they couldn't even reach the site at all (getting back HTTP 403 Forbidden) (I refuse to discuss the techniques due to them possibly using information posted here to circumvent it).

The more simple/easy the question, the more likely spam will happen, and the more overall administrative effort has to be put forth to deal with the aftermath. It's a constant juggling act, to say the least.
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Myask
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by Myask »

I'd argue the first answer was wrong, as that is still in the 2A03, accessible through the relevant push…but the expected answer Memblers mentions is not connected to it. I am a Devil's Advocate.
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dougeff
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by dougeff »

A quick read of the Ricoh 2A03 Wikipedia page (which is very short) says it clearly.

And, I thought the question was intentionally hard to keep out people not genuinely interested in NES development.
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES
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Dwedit
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by Dwedit »

I loved the question that the "Tuts 4 You" reverse engineering community gave when you tried to sign up for an account. The question was encoded as a series of 3 digit numbers in octal. 103 141 156 40 171 157 165 40 162 145 141 144 40 164 150 151 163 77
Here come the fortune cookies! Here come the fortune cookies! They're wearing paper hats!
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by Drew Sebastino »

koitsu wrote:The entire point of the questions is to act as a deterrent for human beings hired to do spamming of forums.
What the heck is the point of that? Is it to advertise crap, like the user "Harry Potter"?
rainwarrior wrote:Is that question something a new user would be expected to know? It seems like a rather advanced bit of trivia to me.
That's what I thought. I guess I got lucky. :lol:
Dwedit wrote: The question was encoded as a series of 3 digit numbers in octal.
I would have assumed it would be in hexadecimal and would have been hopelessly confused. :lol:
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by tepples »

Espozo wrote:
koitsu wrote:The entire point of the questions is to act as a deterrent for human beings hired to do spamming of forums.
What the heck is the point of that? Is it to advertise crap, like the user "Harry Potter"?
Yes. We used to get a lot of ads for World of Warcraft gold sales and power-leveling services.
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Dwedit
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by Dwedit »

I was able to reduce spam to nearly nothing by simply asking who Mario's brother was, with picture of the character next to it.
Is there a single person interested in NESDEV who has never played Super Mario Bros?
Here come the fortune cookies! Here come the fortune cookies! They're wearing paper hats!
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by Drew Sebastino »

That reminds me of how a couple of years ago during Halloween, where I was dressed as Luigi, people kept going up to me to compliment my "Mario" costume. :roll:
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dougeff
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by dougeff »

That reminds of when, in high school, I dressed up as "the crow" and everybody asked me why I dressed up like a mime.
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Banshaku
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Why do we still allow IP editing?

Post by Banshaku »

[Split from Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted]

What I don't understand is if we make it harder on the forum to avoid spam account, why do we allow anonymous editing on the wiki? (Is it still possible?)

Shouldn't the wiki have stricter rule for creating content, like I tried once long time ago (request account on nesdev, only nesdev user can create content) since they are both related anyway? The goal was to reduce administration task in the first place.
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koitsu
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Re: Anti-spam legitimate answer wasn't accepted

Post by koitsu »

Dwedit wrote:I was able to reduce spam to nearly nothing by simply asking who Mario's brother was, with picture of the character next to it.
Is there a single person interested in NESDEV who has never played Super Mario Bros?
Respectfully: this wouldn't work for this forum. The traffic is too high. Again: a simple Google search without any kind of digging will provide an answer to that question. The people doing the spamming read/understand English, and will search to find answers -- but not spend an immense amount of time. The trick is finding the balance -- trivia questions that would take up "too much time" (vs. just moving on to another forum/place), yet still being easy enough that a dedicated (legitimate) person can find the answer. It is not as easy as you might think.
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