# Help think of some Human Verification Questions



## Morrus

It seems that spambots are getting cleverer - they're able to answer our current human verification questions on registration, which are:

How many legs does a dog have?
Dungeons and WHAT?
What's the last name of the current US President?
So we need some new questions - ones which are harder for a bot to answer, but easy for a human.  They need to have a definite, single-word answer.

Any ideas?


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## Dice4Hire

Hmm.

Since I barely count as human, this is pretty hard 

What famous ship sank in 1912?
The two most famous colas are Coca-cola and?
What famous thing did Rubik invent (shape)?
What does WOTC call their online service?   (dunno about this one)

Something like this?


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## jonesy

reCAPTCHA?


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## Morrus

jonesy said:


> reCAPTCHA?




Is even worse.  Using reCAPTCHA we get tons of spammers break through.  The problem with that is that spammers now outsource the puzzles to humans via malware and the like, and actual people are solving them, returning the answer to the spamserver, which then enters it in the registration field.

I've just tried a new one called keyCAPTCHA - we'll see how that goes.  They say that because of the way it's set up it can't be outsourced (there's no field to enter anything - it's just a puzzle with movable pieces).


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## jonesy

Google research on CAPTCHA's said that the best ones are relative. For instance, it asks you to mark where 'up' is in a picture, without the picture having any classical ups, like skies or faces. And you could obfuscate it with upside down text.

But those also turned out to be really hard for humans in many cases. So, yeah.


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## RangerWickett

"Go to this webpage and tell us an antonym of the third word."


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## El Mahdi

*Human Verification Questions*

_"You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. You reach down and flip the tortoise over on it's back. The tortoise lays on it's back, baking in the hot sun, beating it's legs trying to turn itself over...but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why aren't you helping?"_



(Sorry. Couldn't help myself...)


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## pawsplay

Morrus said:


> It seems that spambots are getting cleverer - they're able to answer our current human verification questions on registration, which are:
> 
> How many legs does a dog have?
> Dungeons and WHAT?
> What's the last name of the current US President?
> So we need some new questions - ones which are harder for a bot to answer, but easy for a human.  They need to have a definite, single-word answer.
> 
> Any ideas?




Well, I think one strategy would be to make them sort of specific to this site so that the databank o' spam doesn't get wise to questions posed on several sites. But that's potentially tricky.


Setting aside the issue of class, what is your race?
What world is this? (Type letters as one word)


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## ggroy

Use a math question?

ie. "What is the first derivative of x, with respect to x?"


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## jonesy

ggroy said:


> "What is the first derivative of x, with respect to x?"



Hmm. 1?


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## TarionzCousin

Do we have the capability to trap spam bots? 

Another suggestion I've seen but not explained is "Create a field that only spambots can see. Then if that field is filled in, you'll know it's a spambot."


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## Dannyalcatraz

"What is the name of the heavy metal singer who started off in a band called Elf?"

"How many arms does Def Leppard's drummer have?"

"What have I got in my pocketses?"


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## pawsplay

What is the air speed of an unladen swallow?


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## Dannyalcatraz

"What is the first name of the man in the Devil costume in Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast videoclip?"

"How many members of Iron Maiden's current lineup have pilot's licenses?"


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## Scott DeWar

Of what nation is Tokyo the capital of? [Japon or Nippon]

what obstical did Pink Floyd have a song about? The [Wall]

What is the name of the Russian space lab sent up during the '70's (?) [Soyez]

What green substance is made of people [Soylant] green

What is the velocity of a *Europen * Swallow carrieing a coconut on a calm day, sea level+3 M Baromator at 30 inches, 21 deg C.? [32 KPH]

What name does the Gunuh' of En World  go by [Morrus]

What color of the sky of Terra, Sol 3 (Solarus prime) on a clear day [blue]


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## renau1g

Drizzt is what type of elf?

The setting that Ed Greenwood created. The _______ Realms

Which of the following die is not used in D&D? d20, d10, d100, d26


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## Morrus

renau1g said:


> Drizzt is what type of elf?
> 
> The setting that Ed Greenwood created. The _______ Realms
> 
> Which of the following die is not used in D&D? d20, d10, d100, d26




The problem with those is what happens to the newbie, never played D&D, interested in checking it out and wants to ask some questions or find out more. Maybe he's not yet familar with dice notations, or has never heard of Ed Greenwood, and didn't even know you could have "types" of elf.

Or maybe he has no interest in D&D at all!  He's here because of another game!


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## Raven Crowking

"A human says What?"

"Speak, friend, and enter."


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## Umbran

Hitching human verification to genre-specific stuff is a bit of a problem, yes.  

Most of the "farming out" goes to places with lots of available labor at low wages, where English is probably not the first language of teh person solvign the captcha.

So, using English language based confirmations might work better - base on homonyms or puns?  Rebuses?


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## jonesy

"Are you human? Answer backwards." And the answer is: backwards.


Ow, ow, stop hitting me!


How about: "Click the right button to continue." and then you'd have three buttons, one on the right titled 'wrong', one in the middle titled 'left', and one on the left titled 'right'.


I said, stop hitting me!


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## Scott DeWar

jonesy said:


> "Are you human? Answer backwards." And the answer is: backwards.
> 
> 
> Ow, ow, stop hitting me!
> 
> 
> How about: "Click the right button to continue." and then you'd have three buttons, one on the right titled 'wrong', one in the middle titled 'left', and one on the left titled 'right'.
> 
> 
> I said, stop hitting me!




*smack punch kick smack!*


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## Elephant

Ouch.  I'd fail 2/3 of the questions posted in this thread.

Just call me Dumbo, I guess


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## Scott DeWar

What state does the POTUS claim to have been born: Hawaii
What state does the mother of POTUS claim he was born in: Nigeria
_*P*_resident
_*O*_f
_*T*_he
_*U*_nited
_*S*_tates


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## Morrus

Even I wouldn't get that one, and I'm the site owner!


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## Scott DeWar

President obaba claims to have been born in the USA, his mother says he was born in nigeria or a country close to there. He seems to not be able to find his birth cirtificate to prove either way.

(you would think his mother would know where he was born, wouldn't you?) 

I guess this question was too limited in the 'who would know the answer' group, eh?


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## jonesy

Hasn't his mother been dead for 16 years now?


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## Morrus

Scott DeWar said:


> President obaba claims to have been born in the USA, his mother says he was born in nigeria or a country close to there. He seems to not be able to find his birth cirtificate to prove either way.
> 
> (you would think his mother would know where he was born, wouldn't you?)
> 
> I guess this question was too limited in the 'who would know the answer' group, eh?




Well, I know nothing about President Obama's mother, so I would have failed to register. That said, let's keep politics out of this. Last thing we want is people actually discussing this on EN World.


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## Plane Sailing

I guess that most people visit ENworld for a bit, and then decide to register once they decide they have something to say. You could perhaps ask something which humans could find out - like "give the name of one of the moderators here"

edit: or use 'admins' since they aren't listed at the bottom of each forum page


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## Dice4Hire

Yeah, it is hard doing these questions, especially as it is easy to Google the answer. 

I don't know how many you want to do, but would it be possible to do each question for a week or so, and that way even if the answer is farmed out it will not be useful for long?


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## Jemal

WHAT is your Quest?

Or a picture thing LIKE Capcha that has a sentence like "Type in only the third word of this sentence".  Spambots that do figure out what it says would likely type in the whole thing wheras a human reading the instructions properly would type in "Only".


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## fba827

Morrus said:


> It seems that spambots are getting cleverer - they're able to answer our current human verification questions on registration, which are:
> 
> How many legs does a dog have?
> Dungeons and WHAT?
> What's the last name of the current US President?
> So we need some new questions - ones which are harder for a bot to answer, but easy for a human.  They need to have a definite, single-word answer.
> 
> Any ideas?




If *that* level of question is getting beaten, then anything harder will turn away potential registrants.

(Though I suspect someone probably sets up the bot's account, but it is possible for a bot to break those questions since they have easy keywords... i.e. you ask a computer "how many ..." of anything and it will start spitting out numbers. ask a computer anything with the word president and it will probably spit out the current president or the first president, etc. and the hardest one is actually "dungeons and .." though i guess google does come up with dragons a lot (eventually, when you get past the pornography results)

The audience (and potential audience) on ENWorld is pretty much any age group, any educational level, any geographic location (though, admittedly, there probably is a spike in demographics skewed towards male, late20s-mid30s, u.s., college educated).  So it's hard to find a common theme there to make accessible questions.


How about instead of making the questions harder, you simply rotate the questions around every day/week whatever (if there is an easy way to do that) out of a stock of similar-level questions such that if the questions are broken by a bot they can't keep generating as easily since the next time they try it will get a different group of questions.


(sorry, i know all that is a ramble - my point being, rather than changing the *difficulty* of the questions, is it possible to increase the pool of questions and have a random 3 pulled from there every time to be answered?)


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## HolyMan

Jemal said:


> WHAT is your Quest?
> 
> Or a picture thing LIKE Capcha that has a sentence like "Type in only the third word of this sentence".  Spambots that do figure out what it says would likely type in the whole thing wheras a human reading the instructions properly would type in "Only".




I like this... Remember the test that told you to read everything before continuing and at the end it told you to ignore all the above questions.

Could you have something like that with say 6 questions and as soon as two are answered you know it is a bot. 

The next to last question would say something like... Ignoring all above questions what is the answer to the one below?...

HM


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## RangerWickett

http://xkcd.com/810/

I'd post the actual comic, but it has profanity.


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## darjr

I think the problem is that it isn't a bot anymore. It's a system where by human beings answer the questions for the spammers.

So simple questions that those 'helpers' will probably have no way of knowing. Like 'Who is the owner of the site?' or 'What kind of die is in the logo?' might be better.


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## TarionzCousin

darjr said:


> I think the problem is that it isn't a bot anymore. It's a system where by human beings answer the questions for the spammers.
> 
> So simple questions that those 'helpers' will probably have no way of knowing. Like 'Who is the owner of the site?' or 'What kind of die is in the logo?' might be better.



Brand new members probably wouldn't know the owner of the site, but they should recognize the die in the logo.


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## Elephant

TarionzCousin said:


> Brand new members probably wouldn't know the owner of the site, but they should recognize the die in the logo.




Someone new to RPGs might not.  You can't really make registration tests based on insider knowledge if you want to get more subscribers.


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## jonesy

I'm not so sure they would if they've never played D&D. The problem with game specific questions is that it makes it hard for new players to get in. As has already been said.

On the other side of the coin, it's an icosahedron. It might be easier for a spammer who knows basic geometry to crack, than for someone who's new to the d20.

Edit: ninja'd by the elephant.


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## fba827

jonesy said:


> Edit: ninja'd by the elephant.




that just sounds ..... funny and scary at the same time 

(anyway, sorry for the tangent. we now return you to your regularly scheduled thread already in progress)


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