[Phoenix-pm] phoenix.pm.org update/THE PASSWORD IS...

[Brock]

Well I think the password method is good for the Phoenix.PM wiki. But
just in the way of discussion -- I was having daily spam, done by humans
I believe, on my own site before implementing this. But the questions I
chose are either technical or perhaps american-centric (like the "This
old man..." fill-in-the-blank). While the spammers may read/write
english, that is only one part of being able to answer the questions.
The questions themselves can be domain-specific.

Also, on an on-topic note, this QuestionAsker extension is written in
Perl for Oddmuse. The question database is a hash of static strings
mapped to subrefs. So the answers can be complicated. For example:

  "How many lives does a cat have?" => sub { shift =~ /9|nine/i },

  "Tell me any number between 1 and 10 (inclusive)" => sub {
    $a = shift;
    ($a > 0 && $a < 11) # maybe should convert from english->int ?
  },

which is all sorts of fun. Perhaps more fun would be
automatically-generated questions too :)

--Brock

On 2006.01.13.20.19, Scott Walters wrote:
| Hi Brock,
| 
| Not entirely a bad idea, a text-based captcha, but in this case, it's
| humans who are manually spamming these things -- apparently often low
| cost but English reading and writing foreign labor -- so I don't want
| any humans to have access except the group and people who email me.
| The Wiki is updated extremely infrequently or never by people
| outside this group and by very few people within this group.
| But all of this is of course still up for debate. This is just my
| reasoning so far.
| 
| -scott
| 
| On  0, Brock <awwaiid at thelackthereof.org> wrote:
| > On 2006.01.13.11.59, Scott Walters wrote:
| > | But that's not all. Saving pages is now password protected. I'm sick
| > | to death of Wiki spam and there's no diff.cgi on there, and I don't
| > | want to have to remember to police this Wiki besides PerlDesignPatterns.
| > | The password is 'brock2'. 
| > 
| > Did you see my text-based captchca thingie? When you save a page on my
| > wiki it asks something like "Name a four-letter programming language
| > that starts with a 'P' and ends in an 'l'", or "This old man came _____
| > home". Get the answer and you can save the page. Try it out on my
| > SandBox, http://thelackthereof.org/wiki.pl/SandBox
| > 
| > | But wait, there's more! http://phoenix.pm.org/rss.cgi is a cheezeball
| > | RSS 0.91 feed that (currently) only tells you when a page was last
| > | edited. Here's how that's useful: if PerlCalendar was recently 
| > | edited, someone probably posted a meeting announcement, and you should
| > | pop on over to the site to read it. 
| > 
| > Awesome
| > 
| > --Brock
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| > Phoenix-pm at pm.org
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