WTF is up with site registration?

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Okay, I will TRY to stick within posting guidelines here but I am in max rage mode right now…

WT ever flying F is up with the registration asking you vague, highly-specific, and (if you are using a tileset instead of ASCII) UNKNOWABLE quiz questions about deep-level game questions to verify your registration? What large structure is special to 0.B? Well, since I only STARTED PLAYING on 0.B, I don’t know what wasn’t there before, now do I? What “large grey R terrorizes people on the roads”? Well, damn, since I use a tileset, there are no large Rs running around my screen. Holy son of the lord of that one popular religion, what’s with this?

That is offensive on so many levels, I just HAD to trial-and-error it enough so I could register and come here to B&M about it.

It is stupid, plain and simple, conceited to the maximum, and highly enraging that I have to pass some sort of psychotic quiz come in and post comments in this forum. I have NEVER seen that kind of unfriendly, unwelcoming behavior ever before, not even on the something awful forums. And that’s saying quite a bit…

Honestly.

Remove it.

Please.

I beg you.

2

I haven t seen the registration form ever since the spam bots invaded.
Perhaps it was abit overkill? Seeing how we got overrun by Bots maybe someone overreacted.
Your the first to complain about it though. There have been a few newcomers to the forums since they changed the registration afaik .

Are the monsters not displayed as letters on the compas?

Regardless i am not sure whether one should ask specific questions like that.
Uhm welcome to the forums .

3

Yeah, they are… But I only ran across a “Tank Drone” once, before it killed me in two shots, so I didn’t even have time to look at the letter, honestly.

And I dunno how anyone else can get through it so easily. The questions were ridiculous. I had to do honest research to find the answers. I thought it was a trick to make me read the agreement or something (along the same principles as those old copy protection schemes which hid the answers to questions in the game manual), but no, the answers weren’t buried in the legalese or anywhere I could easily find. I had to search through the wiki and monster browser to find all the grey "R"s in there (and there were a few, by the way, only one of which was the correct answer).

Ugh. So much for the welcome, eh… :stuck_out_tongue: :slight_smile:

4

Yeah well xD

Anyways removing it isn t the best idea id say because i am sure the spam attacks will reommence then :smiley:

Fine tuning it might be due though .

hehe odly enough i think i only ever ran into a tank drone once.
Seeing how much i have been playing the game i am fascinated how some people run into these things constantly.

5

You missed the Spamining. We were flooded with like 30 spam-bots a day at one point and thus this registration process was started.

We could possibly come up with better ways, not that I know of any.

6

I had to retry a few times. Sometimes I simply did not know the answer, flat out, despite playing for a few months. Sometimes, I knew the answer, but my answer did not match the expected answer? Like, what mob is well-known for speaking, I kept typing mi-go, or Mi-go, or migo.

Anyway, I did think it was a little OTT, unfair sometimes.

7

Perhaps swap to multiple choice?

8

…I still think we should go with “click the cat” yah know, three pictures of dogs and then one that’s a cat…

9

Or we can use a captcha. Like, you know, every other place in existence.

10

Or we can use some simplier forms of calculus captcha.

11

I’m gonna side with the cat captcha. It keeps spambots out, and people get to see cat pictures. It’s a win-win.

12

Catptcha

13
What large single structure is a major feature of stable 0.B

W-what I don’t even know that. Is it talking about something in the games programming?

14

Well I sorta agree, the registration questions seem rather specific. And IMO the answers to some of them would be very hard to find while lurking. The probably worst offender is:

What is the biggest structure added in 0.B?
I’m not even sure if the answer is the mall or if it is the vault city; I dont even know if the mall was added on 0.A or in 0.B. And how is someone new going to know they were added with 0.B? I guess they could meticulously read the change log, but I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to expect from new people.

I think we may be turning off a lot of prospective forum members with questions like this, because honestly I think most of us (well only me perhaps) wouldn’t really like to read through pages of unrelated game discussion looking for answers to completely unrelated questions before we get to ask our own trivial question about the game; I rather just play the game and figure the answer myself.

15

Yeah the registration was kinda annoying and I would have failed if I hadn’t been lurking for little over 1.5 years.

16
(...)Explore new locations, some of which are ridiculously big (did somebody say 'mall'?)(...)

I thought that one was fairly safe, because we mention it RIGHT THERE ON THE FRONT PAGE FOR FAE’S SAKE.

[hr]

Cat captcha used to be on the wiki, worked OK for a while. Then microsoft decided it didn’t wanna run the cat captcha anymore.

KA101 is fond of cats and would be very inclined to use the Asirra cat captcha if it was still operational. Folks looking at adoptable kitties is a good thing, as it may lead to adoptions and less shelter crowding.

So the wiki was Jammed for a while, GlyphGryph and I removed the captcha code for about an hour or so to fix, and in that process we got oh, about a hundred spambots signing up for accounts. Some folks just went sleeper, most used their talk pages for SEO spam, and a few vandalized pages.

So I implemented question-based captchas there (after google’s reCaptcha didn’t care to actually cooperate) and called in the rest of the admins to help with the cleanup. I appreciate Kevin and Rivet pitching in with the Whack A Spammer, and now the wiki is becoming helpful once more.

Here on the forum, things were OK until the spam invasion. I wasn’t there to see most of it but got a phone call(!) one Sunday because the forum was seriously swamped. After half an hour trying and failing to find a way to tighten matters via the server (I have server access, but wasn’t a forum admin at the time) I changed the server settings to lock the whole forum down until Kevin could sort out the problem. He did, and that was the first level of question-captcha on the forum. There were about three there.

First thing I did after being made an admin was to tighten up the captcha questions here. There are now fourteen, and you have to get two right to register. I’ve just tweaked 'em a bit, though since you’ve passed, that’s unlikely to be of much help.

Math captchas are pretty easy for a machine to work, I should think, given how much math is involved in DDA. SMF doesn’t support multiple-guess captchas, but we supply possible answers for most of the questions now.

17

I approve of the use of cats.

18

[quote=“KA101, post:16, topic:8673”]

(…)Explore new locations, some of which are ridiculously big (did somebody say ‘mall’?)(…)

I thought that one was fairly safe, because we mention it RIGHT THERE ON THE FRONT PAGE FOR FAE’S SAKE.[/quote]

I got stuck up on that question because in my game it’s called a ‘mega-store’ not a ‘mall’. Unless those are different structures and I’ve just never found a mall.

Anyway, just posting because I had a very hard time with the registration questions myself.

19

They’re different structures. The mall is a mall. The megastore is Wal*Mart.

20

They’re different structures. The mall is a mall. The megastore is Wal*Mart.[/quote]

Does the mall not spawn in Classic Zombies? I’ve made it through 90 day seasons with several characters and never seen a mall spawn in any of my towns.