Nautical Captcha questions...

A new member was having trouble answering our CAPTCHA questions so he wrote me a note....

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Your CAPTCHA ( gotcha) crap sucks.
What a waste of time .
I had to search for stupid BOAT gotcha.
I really thought one would pee in a "head".
The folks at Elco who built my old boat in 1926 would not be pleased.
Fire the nerds and get real

****

I responded with...

I appreciate that you took time to send me an email. The nerds that came up with the CAPTCHA questions are all members of YF that were trying to help me battle bots. It subsequently put a stop to the bots. This is the thread that documents how we arrived at the questions and answers...

https://www.yachtforums.com/threads/nautical-captcha-questions.35020/

Have a nice day.

Carl @ YF

***

So there you have it, your questions made a human have to think!

A fellow admin that runs a forum about a mid-engine car built by Honda developed several mathematical CAPTCHA questions to stop the bots and it effectively prevented dumb humans from registering. His forum was originally comprised of knowledgeable, passionate owners that created a big resource on these cars. Unfortunately that attracted every rice burning, megaphone exhaust idiot on the internet and the forum soon became a collection of random comments like you see under a YouTube video.

When the math based CAPTCHA questions were put in place, new registrations slowed considerably but the quality of discussions & information went back up. Each month we have a couple people who are annoyed by the registration process at YF and I'm usually on the receiving end of their frustration. Most of the time, this can be contributed to the age of our members but sometimes it's guys who are otherwise digitally literate, engineering types. Go figure!

If our CAPTCHA questions weed out bots PLUS engineers that want to rattle off their credentials - but still can't get past our nautical questions - then your job is secure Ken!