[Python-Dev] Summary of Tracker Issues

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

O.R.Senthil Kumaran writes:

 > :-) My idea was, a human got to answer it unscrambled as 'fourth' as  he
 > "understands" what the question is and gives the proper answer.

 > Agreed, there could be confusion at first.

But for any given user, there's only going to be a first.  Either they
pass the test the first time and after that authenticate via personal
password, or they say WTF!!  In that case we could lose all the bug
reports they were ever going to write.

If we're going to do CAPTCHA, what we're looking for is something that
any 4 year old does automatically, but machines can't do at all.
Visual recognition used to be one, but isn't any more.  The CAPTCHA
literature claims that segmentation still is (dividing complex images
into letters), but that's nontrivial for humans, too, and I think that
machines will eventually catch up.  (Ie, within a handful of months.)

I think it would be better to do content.  URLs come to mind; without
something clickable, most commercial spam would be hamstrung.  But
few bug reports and patches need to contain URLs, except for
specialized local ones pointing to related issues.

For example, how about requiring user interaction to display any post
containing an URL, until an admin approves it?  Or you could provide a
preview containing the first two non-empty lines not containing an
URL.  This *would* be inconvenient for large attachments and other
data where the reporter prefers to provide an URL rather than the
literal data, but OTOH only people who indicate they really want to
see spam would see it.  ;-)