MAJOR bug

[say_hello_to_anna]

Hi, biggest bug ever - why was I asked an Einstein question to verify I was "human". This is exactly what makes me angry about the FS community; I have a degree and have written 2 novels and I had to ask someone else for the answer. That's not verifying that Im human, its insulting and ruse and humiliating. Screw you all, I'm gonna download xbuntu instead.

bye

[Rich]

Hi say_hello_to_anna
I'm sorry that you feel that way. The forum recently made some some changes to try to curb the
spammers and spambots that had been contributing here. So far the changes have helped, but if
you have some ideas of how to implement them in a more user friendly way, why don't you offer
some suggestions?

[Jason W]

Hi say_hello_to_anna,
Greetings to you too.  I can say that anyone who has spent time here in the last few months can attest to the massive spam attacks we have received.  We were forced to have to deal with such things.  The team and community would much rather spend our time on creating a distro than reporting and deleting spam, which was arriving almost on the hour every hour.

So please blame the spammers if you are not happy when upon registration you are required to verify that you are human after all.

[hiro]

So far the changes have helped

Do you know how many legitimate people are being kept from accessing the site?

[ali]

i can't believe the trouble you guys are going through just to apologise to this "thing"
i mean look at him "Screw you all, I'm gonna download xbuntu instead." and what do you guys do? apologise, for what? was this guy wronged by anyone? 
would you honestly want to be associated with such an ingrate?
i remember reading the "linux is not windows" article long time ago and it ended with

It's not just about "Why should I want Linux?". It's also about "Why should Linux want me?"

and that's the question i would like to ask say_hello_to_anna, why should tinycore want you?

[gutmensch]

There's no need to apologize for anything here. If you click on the "Reload" button (which should be possible for everyone, even without any degree at all) you will get another question, I hope every human user knows where to find that button, if not I'm completely helpless and it's not that much effort, when you get a almost spamming free forum afterwards I think. Btw. the specific Einstein question can also easily be answered after a short look at the WP article about Einstein - why refusing to learn something new and so absolutely fundamental? However, I'll try to make it more simple as I don't want anyone to register in anger... 

@hiro: I hope your sticking to the topic and you're not referring to the spam problems of your specific network, which we already discussed. It is absolutely legitimate to ban IPs, which spam provable 80% of their time online, if you like it or not. It is the task of the provider to take care of these spammers and not the task of the forum to let spammers in.

@all: I'm really open to "easy" questions, which can divide humans from bots. It's a community, please be of help if you've got good ideas - best would be to PM me those, so they are kept private.

[Rich]

@hiro: No I don't, though I did read about the problems you were having.

@ali: When faced with a confrontation there are different ways one can respond. A nuke, a show of
         force, or diplomacy. Since unnecessary escalation doesn't solve anything, I chose the latter.
         I felt it more productive not to treat the post as a personal attack, rather treat it as a sign of
         extreme frustration on the part of the user, and simply explain why things are the way they
         are. This is also in line with forum policy of trying to keep all posts civil.

[Jason W]

Apologize??  Telling someone to blame the spammers for us having to tighten the registration process hardly qualifies as an apology.  And the "Hi, Greetings to you too" was obviously sarcastic, when said in response to that kind of thing it is just saying "Right back at you".

[hiro]

gutmensch, I'm no longer on my said network and thus have no problems whatsoever.
I'm indeed willing to stay on topic trying to make sure users can join without issues.

While I'm an active forum user who dares to complain I'm sure there are others, not so active, but legit users with difficulties of registering or logging in. They might not be able or willing to speak up.
As there seem to be several layers of walls against spammers the whole system is complex and might be prone to failure (in the sense of not letting legit users through).
We should be able to let 100% of legit users through and still block about 99% of spammers.
You seem to block 100% of spammers now, but there's at least 1% of backfire (me).
Sorry for these arbitrary figures, but this is how I feel about it

I think we should thank anna for taking her time to speak up, although I don't share her objectives. She only had to answer a simple question which is way more user friendly than the standard captchas I'm never getting used to decipher. I guess we are all old enough to overlook anna's small choleric excess (please suggest a better wording)

Would someone please share that "Einstein question" with me? I'm getting interested in what it actually was about.

[Rich]

Hi hiro
First of all, it's good to hear that you got your login woes resolved.

Actually, it's probably 99.9%, a few 'spammy" posts have been removed since these new measures
were implemented.

I would have said  "verbal outburst"  instead of  "choleric excess", but that's only because then I
wouldn't have to look up what choleric means.

[roberts]

We cannot please everyone with the security efforts that have been implemented.
The benefits are obvious. There will be no change forthcoming.
This topic has run its course so I am therefore closing it.