On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 7:00 PM, Jeremy Nicoll - ml archlinux <jn.ml.alx.581@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Feliz Xett <fezett@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> I've been using arch for a couple of months now and I'm very happy with >> it. Today, I somewhat broke my box so I was excited to post my first >> question to the forums at bbs.archlinux.org. On the bottom of the >> registration page there was a very clever "captcha". The question was: >> >> What is the output of "date -u +%V$(uname)|sha256sum|sed 's/\W//g'"? > > I've been lurking on this maillist for maybe a year, after reading somewhere > that Arch might be a good solution for me as a linux newbie. I have some > experience of Win XP, much more of RISC OS (the ARM/Archimedes OS) and about > 20 years of experience of IBM's VM/SP and MVS (now z/OS) OSes, as both a > systems programmer and a programmer. > > Before I read this thread I could only guess what this command was going to > do, and was puzzled at how a command whose output I assumed would vary > (because dates do, and 'uname' looks user-specific) on different people's > systems was going to produce a useful value; I'd assumed that the sed part > probably throws away most/all of the results of the sha '256 passed in to > it. But, without a working linux to evaluate it, I would have been stuck. > For example, I did not know that web-accessible linux systems exist... > > I dare say I would have found out what it does, somehow, because I'm > old-fashioned enough to use usenet and mail-lists for seeking help, but for > many younger people, forums are the only thing they know. But it would have > annoyed me that I'd need to waste time solving this side-issue when all I'd > have wanted was to solve whatever my own problem was. Unlike the view that > some of the people posting here seem to have - that anyone could solve this > quickly with a bit of poking around on the internet - I'm not so sure. I > could see myself wasting a day or two quite easily. And maybe I'd not try, > but go somewhere else instead. > > It seems to me that this captcha stops potential linux users, as opposed to > those who do have a working system, from joining your forum. > > -- > Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own. The forums and wiki had a serious infestation of human spammers. This captcha has stopped all spam on the wiki since it was implemented. I imagine the forum has seen a similar result but I don't know for sure.
