Anti-spam human checks

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We were hit pretty hard lately by some spammers. My apologies.

In particular, my apologies to the various users of Debian.Org mailing lists, as the spammer hit those sending spam out to the lists. The sending out of mailing list mail has been temporarily suspended.

To cut back on this nonsense, we've now implemented a "human verification check" to break the spammers' posting script. This shouldn't prove too much of a hassle, and the system implemented is, IMHO, "easier" to deal with than the systems which warp letters and expect you to type them in.

But it does kind of add a hurdle to a new Debian user -- you have to be smart enough to do simple arithmetic. :-)

Feedback on what you think of the checks is welcome...

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Will it work?

Submitted by cammoblammo on Thu, 2007-09-13 19:02.

I don't have any problem with this, so long as you don't go for the image type captcha --- I have all sorts of problems with those, and I don't always use a GUIfied machine.

My other question is this --- how much of the spam we're getting is automated? If most of it is, then good.

--
A tidy house is the sign of a stolen computer.

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Failed math.

Submitted by jaclon on Thu, 2007-09-13 20:08.

I finished ninth grade so I failed the math problem.
It's sad because I had solved the Iraq problem and now I can't post.
Damn the internet outlaws.

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Trouble with Math Questions

Submitted by Matt on Mon, 2007-10-01 12:18.

I've had problems with the math questions. Often it takes on the order of 10 tries to successfully post. I'm using iceweasel.

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Trouble with Math Questions

Submitted by Matt on Mon, 2007-10-01 12:19.

Refreshing the page seems to help when that happens.

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Trouble with Math Questions

Submitted by Matt on Mon, 2007-10-01 12:24.

Interesting. If I refresh the page AFTER clicking preview, and then enter the correct answer, the post goes through.

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