Topic: The sign-up process - really?

[LPSP]

Just joined today in order to search for an answer to a question that is absent from the rest of the internet. That will be posted in its relevant forum.

The section at the end of the signing in process is very poorly designed. Terrible even.

1) It asks three questions, which are actually picked from a set of four and arranged in an arbitrary order every time you load the page.

2) Three of these possible questions have straightforward yes or no answers, but one of them rejects any such answer in favour of a different format altogether

3) Every time you guess a yes or no variant (maybe or neither etc.) and inevitable get a rejection, BOTH of your passwords are deleted from the type in box at the top, requiring you to type them BOTH in again every time to you need to make a guess

4) A final kick in the teeth, the questions swap around in orders with each reload, yet the answer boxes don't. So you'll have typed in say "yes" in the top box to the question "Are you a human?", but when the missed guess comes up next, that question is dice-rolled into "Are you a robot?" and so you get another failure this time because you didn't change the "yes" into a "no".

Thus the joining member must end up typing in their own password about 16-20 times repeatedly with each arbitrary retry because of a silly hokey-hokey system of questions with a dishonest shifting set of criteria. This system is crackers and very frustrating.

Now the first bit though, I liked that. Actually quizzing people on the forum's rules makes perfect sense, even if some of the examples were wank. But that last bit has got to have some adjustments.

AGS is a great piece of software and I look forward to talking about it, but that was annoying (especially since I am in a hurry atm) and it would've been wrong to bury it.

[AGA]

The second part's behaviour / buginess is built in functionality of the SMF forum software.  The reason they're worded the way they are is that this, plus the quiz, is as close to a foolproof anti spam system as you can get.  Believe me, over the 15+ years of us using SMF and various registration systems, this is as close to inpenetrable by bots as we've gotten.  It may unfortunately be annoying to use, but we get a handful of spam bots registering *per day* otherwise!

[LPSP]

The anti-robot intent of the design needs no statement, it's perfectly obvious by the employment of "Are you a robot?" as some variant of all of the questions.

The chief issue is the changing order of the questions every time you attempt them, and the need type in the password again and again (twice every time!), plus clicking the captcha repeatedly. which eventually results in those tedious little picture puzzle games.

Have variations of this system without these measures (in all combinations) seen testing? Because straight-up, I can't see how those highlight issues do anything to stop bots - the middle one about re-entering the passwords in particular.

Or, would including a notification that the question orders change and that some questions aren't yes/no answers really kill the system?

[AGA]

Dude, the SMF forums are here for any bug reports you'd like to make.  We use it, don't maintain it!  You're banging your head on a brick wall at this point.

[LPSP]

Right, I had no idea about that. I was operating under the assumption that AGSF had developed this system, hence the general cadence of my prior posts. That may have been a lazy assumption on reflection.

In light of that, I'd like to stress that I don't expect anyone here to develop an alternative; that would be insane. This system evidently works better than other options available, even if it's a bitch initially.

Thank you for the link! And good will.