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The 500 pound question to get you started

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-05-26 07:22:45 - Graham Ellis

On the "Who wants to be a Millionaire?" Quiz show, you can win just £500 for getting the first question right ... but then the question is an easy one. It's designed, I suspect, to help put participants at ease. And it would also - very quickly - filter out anyone who wasn't familiar with the local ways and idioms.

There has been an increase in sign up requests to some of the forums I help run - the oxygen of publicity for them also publicises them to people who's job it is to advertise other products online. We already have Captcha Technology running - "retype this word from a graphic" - and that traps the automata, but it still allows passage from the spammer who's going through lots of forums by rote, performing the same registration on each.

You'll have seen that some other forums have taken to asking simple questions on ther registration - but questions that are only simple to people who have read up on the subject or have local knowledge. And so I'm starting to experiment with such questions. Getting them wrong isn't an immediate and visible reject (yet ?) - for testing, I'm starting by just logging responses and using that as extra data in my decision.

Added to the registration form:

echo '<tr><td><b>Check Question</b><br>
Which county is Melksham in?</td>
<td><select name=sqn>
<option value=0>Please Choose from:</option>
<option value=1>Essex</option>
<option value=2>Hampshire</option>
<option value=3>Suffolk</option>
<option value=4>Wiltshire</option>
<option value=5>Warwickshire</option></select></td></tr>';

And added to the page that accepts the completed registration form:

$fhj = fopen("$_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]/../secret.txt","a");
$now = date("r");
fputs($fhj,"$_POST[sqn] $_POST[user] $_POST[email] $now\n");
fclose($fhj);

For testing, I can then have a quick look at that file to see if a potential user knows his "bangers and mash" from his "bangers and pineapple", "bangers and bumpers" and "bangers and chips" ... and potentially later on I can automate acceptances and rejections based on the answer.

(Source code is suitable for SMF / Simple Machines Forum. Variable names, etc, would need to be changed for other software)