Jamie Bliss wrote:
On 5/29/05, Dori <slowpoke(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>I am not sure how many blind people participate on wikis, but why not
>go with a simple [math] question that can be answered easily and
>unambiguously by a person but not by simple bots. I'm not suggesting a
>full blown Turing test, something as simple as "1 plus 1 is ?" Have a
>series of these and throw one out randomly.
>
>
I saw an article, I think in the recent edition of TPJ (the perl
journal), on exactly this. Simple question that would otherwise require
a bot to be programmed to answer
Of course something as public as wikipedia will need something stronger
because it wouldn't be that hard to program a bot to answer the question
For partially sighted users the question still works (if you don't use
graphics), but I have noticed people using a parallel audio test as
well. This could be useful, but is annoying for me since I disable all
the audio on most of my machines.
Please do consider partially sighted users though - in many countries it
is now *law* that websites must not discriminate, and it's so easy to
just ignore a minority, *because* they are a minority. Website admins
will just switch on whatever system you build, so please make it
suitable for everyone....
(There must be something already written which can be just plugged in?)
By the way, the serious spammers apparently use a bunch of software
which feeds the images to banks of humans to tap in the answers and lets
them sign up to accounts that way. So in the face of this level of
serious action I think the goal is really only to stop automatic hacking
bots run by 14 year olds
Ed W