[Discussion] Skill-Testing Registration Question

[Broomstick]

No. Anyone who can't figure out "36 miles at 75 mph" is too fucking stupid. I won't tolerate the presence of such a person. Are you saying that you need to "enjoy math and science" in order to handle such a ludicrously simple problem? That an artist or writer can't figure out the concept of distance and speed without wracking his brain or running to his textbooks?

>cough< Can I say something? I'm an artist/writer who sucks at math, having spent years in the remedial end of it and totally wiping out on pre-calculus. Despite all that, I can figure out that problem. If an adult can't manage that problem they ARE fucking stupid. Being artist is not a "get out of math free" card in this life.

It just seems like a silly objection. I'm terrible at math and I routinely do that exact math problem whenever I'm on a long drive and want to know how long until I arrive.

I didn't have time to formulate an example this morning, but I wanted to illustrate the type of math problems faced by professional artists. As my concentration is in textiles and weaving I'll use a pertinent examples from there.

You need to weave a piece of fabric 32 inches wide, at 36 threads per inch, and 10 yards long (FYI for the metric folks - 1 yard = 3 feet = 36 inches). Allowing one yard of wastage on either end of the warp (the lengthwise threads) to anchor it to the loom, how many yards of thread will you need in order to make the warp?

Assuming this is an even weave fabric (36 threads per inch for the weft as well as the warp) how many yards will you need to complete the fabric as planned?

(I could go crazy at this point and start calculating the amount required of each color needed for an Ancient MacCrimmon tartan, but I don't feel like doing that much typing. It's five different colors arranged in, if I recall correctly, 16 different sized stripes. I really did have to sit down and calculate the whole damn thing, including allowing for wastage then figuring out out many skeins I had to buy as the skeins come in set sizes and... well, it was complicated. By the way, the cheap-ass bastard never did pay me for it - if anyone wants 10 yards, or even just one, let me know. A square meter of it, for example, would make a very nice shawl. Fucking last time I weave up a féileadh mòr without payment in ADVANCE!)

If you can't answer those questions you won't make a profit and likely you won't succeed at making what you intend to make. So can we drop the meme that artists don't need math? We don't need the math an engineer like Mr. Wong needs, but we DO need math and we need to do it accurately.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

If we're really worried about the question being insufficient, why can't we make it so that the question has to be passed before you can register and then the registrations are still manually activated? That reduces the work load on the administrators while still having positive control over the process. Everyone/thing who can't answer the question never appears, and only those who have answered it appear for the admins to manually approve.

[RedImperator]

If we're really worried about the question being insufficient, why can't we make it so that the question has to be passed before you can register and then the registrations are still manually activated? That reduces the work load on the administrators while still having positive control over the process. Everyone/thing who can't answer the question never appears, and only those who have answered it appear for the admins to manually approve.

The point of creating the question in the first place was to eliminate the tedious chore of manually approving registrations. There probably will be more spammers who slip through, which is probably why Mike gave supermods ban powers and a mandate to use them against commercial spammers and we have a Report button so regular users can flag spambots. Any supermod can check the report queue at the moderator control panel, see a spammer's been flagged, confirm it's a spammer, and ban it. The whole process takes about two minutes, and it's way more fun.

[Broomstick]

I wanted to relay two items I got from the unwashed masses on this subject.

Name withheld here because the person in question usually does better than this:

In the Skill-Testing Registration Question thread:

Anyone who can't figure out "36 miles at 75 mph" is too fucking stupid.

A lot of people are unfamiliar with Imperial units, so this is not necessarily true. We have users from all over the place, some of them valuable contributors. Knowledge of English does not mean knowledge Imperial units, as they remain in wide usage only in the United States. I think asking the question in metric would be better, and Americans should be familiar with the metric system.

The question doesn't require knowledge of imperial units. If it was expressed as "36 zlorgs at 75 zlorgs per bleppos" it would still be solvable (with the result expressed as "X bleppos" or some sub-unit of bleppos). This is the sort of thing that trips people up with word problems and why they can function as a crude intelligence or logic test.

And another comment:

I, like you, do not know calculus but can do a word problem easily. If it cuts down on spammers, great! I'd love that too. Plus, if it helps deter just your Joe Sixpack average dumbass then I'd be happy about that too. No reason to scare off anyone, but deterring the wierder highschool-age trollspammers we get would be awesome. I'm not real in favor of charging to sign up though, that'd make it hard for casual people to justify signing up. Paypal is not safe enough for someone like me to want to use it here. If there were tons and tons of signups, it'd make it a hacker's dream target. If there were an entirely safe way to do it, I'd be for it though. I just don't believe such a way exists.

I, personally, can't say just how safe PayPal is, or how unsafe, but this is not the first time I've heard such reservations from people. (The Other Half and I have used PayPal off and on for years, we've only had one problem which was unrelated to hackers and was resolved, so I am willing to use it myself but I don't do so very often) Regardless, that hesitation will come up with some folks.

Personally, I'm all for the word problem and would prefer not to see a registration charge for this site. I'd find the latter more discouraging than being asked to problem-solve.

[Ghost Rider]

To the first PM, there's google. If a moron cannot fucking put in MPH in google, then I am thinking less of them by the second. This is not some esoteric physics terminology.

So to the second? Read, dumbass.

As for your other idea of charging everyone money to sign up, that would be vastly more likely to discourage new user registration than this sign-up question, and I can't see how anyone could seriously think otherwise. I can't imagine someone being more reticent to answer a blindingly simple math question than to go get his credit card and pay money.

[Broomstick]

I can't imagine someone being more reticent to answer a blindingly simple math question than to go get his credit card and pay money.

Meet some of my neighbors. Seriously. Well, they won't be my neighbors much longer what with credit card debt and foreclosures and stuff, but yeah, plastic before thinking any time.

But then, they aren't the sort we'd want here anyway.

[Eleas]

It seems to me that a question has to be one that can:

• be answered in a clear and unambiguous manner
• be easy enough to solve for someone willing to devote a moment's thought to it
• be verbally formulated so as to avoid spambots

I remain somewhat more sceptical to the question being in any way challenging. Obviously, it should require a moment's pause, but anything beyond that will do little more to deter bots or manual spammers, and so departs from the purpose of spam control. Now, we may want to control the quality of posters in some manner or the other, but quite frankly, it's quite possible to be adroit at numbers and a dishonest prick at the same time, and I just don't see such a simple method addressing the issue.

[Darth Wong]

It seems to me that a question has to be one that can:

• be answered in a clear and unambiguous manner
• be easy enough to solve for someone willing to devote a moment's thought to it
• be verbally formulated so as to avoid spambots

I remain somewhat more sceptical to the question being in any way challenging. Obviously, it should require a moment's pause, but anything beyond that will do little more to deter bots or manual spammers, and so departs from the purpose of spam control. Now, we may want to control the quality of posters in some manner or the other, but quite frankly, it's quite possible to be adroit at numbers and a dishonest prick at the same time, and I just don't see such a simple method addressing the issue.

I don't think you realize how many automatic spambots used to sign up under the old system. And I'm not talking about people who want to spam and who we call "spambots"; I'm talking about obviously automated scripts, with usernames like "drhe458d7w45". You never noticed them because you didn't have to deal with the constant stream of registrations.

[Ender]

What about a simple "Type these letters in" box, but a block of text telling you to type them in in reverse order?

[Eleas]

I don't think you realize how many automatic spambots used to sign up under the old system. And I'm not talking about people who want to spam and who we call "spambots"; I'm talking about obviously automated scripts, with usernames like "drhe458d7w45". You never noticed them because you didn't have to deal with the constant stream of registrations.

I've obviously had nothing to do with member approval, although Ghost Rider has lamented the workload on many an occasion. However, that wasn't really the point I was trying to make. My point was, the question of weeding out automated spam scripts and enforcing a minimum standard of intelligence should be considered two different exercises. I just can't see how a tougher maths problem would make anything harder for the bots (the way I figure, either they can find a way to parse the question to a form they understand - unlikely at best - or they can't).

[Eleas]

Got two PMs from one of the constituents:

I used to be a semi-active poster on ASVS, haven't found much to comment on here that others haven't said already, but I had a thought or two on the registration discussion in the senate.

I don't know if this is too much work for the admins, but what about using kittenauth or something similar where the new registrant needs to find the Klingon/Romulan/Imperial/Minbari/etc out of a set of various ships from Star Wars, Star Trek, B5, etc? Takes a little bit of thinking, is in keeping with the theme of the board, and not as common as the word problem/obfuscated letters.

I don't have any experience with bbcode, but I've seen that floating around the web before, so figured someone else might have done the grunt work already. Someone has done it before with phpbb. I just found that with a 30 second google. I'd suggest it to the body, and let someone better with web programming take a look and decide if its feasible or not. Worst case, my inbox overflows with flames.

Now, as a matter of practicality, I'm not so sure it's the first choice. How are we in terms of using captcha? Can we implement something like that at all, or does the BBoard code base prevent it?

[phongn]

Virtually all CAPTCHA systems have been broken, if not by computer analysis then by legions of third-world workers.

[Eleas]

Virtually all CAPTCHA systems have been broken, if not by computer analysis then by legions of third-world workers.

That is true. But, trite as it may sound, no system is foolproof. We do try to ward against fools, but we will never catch them all; the question is not if CAPTCHA can be broken, but whether the effort of doing so is great enough to be of sufficient benefit.
As an analogy, take the example of a fortress. Any fortress can, given sufficient military power, be breached, but that does not make it worthless. Do we really expect a small village of Pakistani labourers to target Stardestroyer.net in a concentrated Turing Farm effort?