Commenters here might have noticed that, this week, PooterGeek acquired a new CAPTCHA, that is a test to check that you are, er, “human” before your comment is accepted by the system. It’s to discourage spammers from clogging up this blog with links to their poker, porn, and Viagra sites. The PooterGeek CAPTCHA is basic: you are merely asked to provide a one- or two-character answer to a very simple question in English.
Will the Vulgarian sent me a link yesterday evening to a very interesting and entertaining lecture. Speaker and CAPTCHA inventor, Luis von Ahn starts with an explanation of what a CAPTCHA is and then goes on to outline the fascinating business of what the calls “human computation”. Like Blaise, Luis is witty, a freakin’ genius, and certain to become absurdly rich. This is why I enjoyed noting that he doesn’t know what “statistically significant” means.
that is a test to check that you are, er, “human” before your comment is accepted by the system
… but will at allow ‘Benjamins’?
‘Type the digits—no spaces, no punctuation—that correspond to the word “ten”.’ Are you buying or selling?
No comment, Damian: I just wanted to try out your new system. Like “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, it’s easy when you know the answer.
Thanks.
I had a play of the game a few days ago on Google. Not really my idea of fun but it’s a superb idea that’s delivering a lot of results for them.
“Like “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, it’s easy when you know the answer.”
*cough*cough*
Typical Romophobia. When I was young “X” was the digit that corresponded to the word “ten”. Clearly not modernist enough for you. I like the idea of (selectively) using more complex questions in Captchas to keep our the ignorant (or ill-informed), though.
Did you make it yourself or is it publically available for the rest of us to pinch?
“Spam Quiz” is here. You can make up your own questions for it. Nine of mine are extremely dull and can be answered with one or two keystrokes; the tenth requires basic knowledge of 80s pop culture trivia.
[…] Via PooterGeek, I’ve just intalled WP SpamQuiz, which I am hoping will cut down on the vast quantities of spam that this blog attracts (47,227 spam comments since 16 March this year!). […]
In an attempt to find a plugin that does work, what plugin are you using to display your recent comments and trackbacks together? The one I’m using displays them separately.
[…] For Jo and anyone else’s information the plug-in that displays the latest comments and trackbacks over on the right hand side of the front page of PooterGeek is “Brian’s Latest Comments“. […]
Another test. So does the quiz come after I hit submit….