Which year did the Second World War start?

In an attempt to discourage spam-bots on this forum we've started asking the aforementioned question of new members. Even though a majority of people get it approximately right, answers still range from 1760 to 1986*. For someone whose parents were born over a decade after WWII ended, I still find this an unsettling outcome.

I do have to admit the question is fairly irrelevant in the context of a Grasshopper Ning group, so my challenge this week to all of you is to come up with a better question. The constraints are such:

It must be answerable by someone with a fleeting grasp of the English language
It must successfully differentiate between people and bots
It must not carry political or religious bias (i.e. "What is the One True God?" is not allowed)

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Seattle, WA

* I don't know to what extend these answers are facetious of course.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by marco guardincerri on November 8, 2010 at 11:21am

yep. in europe wwII started in 1939, united states decided to be involved in 1941. you could bypass robots but you'll be forced to open a hystoriograpy forum

Permalink Reply by Arthur Mamou-Mani on November 8, 2010 at 11:37am

Are the distorted words not working anymore to prevent spams ?

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on November 8, 2010 at 1:46pm

I just thought of this great idea for fooling bots. Why don't you show a rasterized representation of a couple of words and make the user type them correctly. Just to be safe, you could apply a few distortion effects while keeping it readable for human eyes.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 8, 2010 at 2:18pm

http://xkcd.com/810/

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Seattle, WA

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on November 8, 2010 at 6:03pm

I linked it first :)
http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/spam-and-bots

I take it the alt text applies clearly on me
touche

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 8, 2010 at 7:21pm

Wouldn't have known about it otherwise :)

I like xkcd comics but I certainly don't memorize all of them.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Seattle, WA

Permalink Reply by taz on November 8, 2010 at 7:07pm

By the way, there are companies in India and China where people get paid by the captchas. I'm sure the Grasshopper3D Ning site is on their top 10 list:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/technology/26captcha.html