Site talk:Captcha

Because the features are new, most users may not know that the e-mail functionality is much improved in this version of mediawiki. Note though that you have to confirm your e-mail address to take advantage of them. I encourage everyone to confirm their e-mail address.

One feature I particularly like is that you can receive e-mail alerts of any pages you are watching. Also you cannot e-mail another user now and they cannot e-mail you, until your e-mail address is confirmed. Finally, as noted on the captcha page, confirming your e-mail address saves you from doing arithmetic. --Matthew Faulconer 09:24, 2 February 2007 (CET)

Very nice--I know many (my wife included) who will do anything to avoid doing math! --RobertC 15:46, 2 February 2007 (CET)

This is fantastic! I just started using a similar system on my blog recently. (I got attacked by a spam-bot.) It gives me warm fuzzies thinking that the site is protected against spam. --Seanmcox 20:20, 2 February 2007 (CET)

First spam in a long time

Some random thoughts...We just got hit with the first spam in a long time. This may be the beginning of the end of our completely spam free utopia we have been living in for the last 6 months. we'll see. What I think is particularly interesting about the approach we took is that (1) i haven't seen it anywhere else (though the code for doing it is actually a legitimate wikimedia plug-in, i.e. I didn't code this myself) (2) it is a really crummy captcha if you think about what qualities you want in one (computer are better at math than we are). I think this goes to show us that the best captcha is the unexpected problem, not necessarily the hard one for a computer program to solve; people are much more flexible than computers. Because we are a small site, it isn't worth coding a special spam bot just for us.

On a different note, I wonder to what degree our simple math problem captcha has reduced the number of anonymous edits we get--either becuase people are a bit confused by it and aren't sure what to do, or because they are simply turned off by "having to do the math" as RobertC puts it. My hope is that the simplicity of the solution hasn't affected the number of anonymous edits we get. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that thinks otherwise...hmmm...there's a certain bias here since anonymous responses would have to pass the captcha math problem. Sorry. --Matthew Faulconer 15:55, 29 August 2007 (CEST)