No, this isn’t another question…

Our experiment with the “math puzzle” as a captcha didn’t work out. Turns out that whatever script kiddie was spamming us has some basic math skills integrated into the scripts he runs. I normally contend that these nutjobs are mentally impaired (to the point of having trouble breathing without external guidance), but now I must grudgingly admit that this dexterity with numbers was not something I anticipated. Every dog has its day, I guess.

Anyway, the end result of this is that we now have a normal captcha up for unregistered users. Registered users can post without any issues.

Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. It’s just that the spam was getting a bit much to handle for either of us, and it was only increasing.

Please do let us know immediately if you face any problems. You can post here, or if not possible, mail us at [email protected]

UPDATE: http://www.boiledbeans.net/2008/04/04/reverse-turing-test/

Older post:

In order to keep off script kiddies from posting spam comments, we have added a math based captcha which shows up when you try to post a comment while not logged in.

Here is an example question which will appear on April 1, 2009:

On all other days, the questions will be as simple as “add 5 and 5”, which as a quizzer, should not be hard for you. But in case you forgot addition, keep some abacus variant handy ( Google is also a part-time abacus variant.. it has a calculator built in :) )

If you detest captchas, please register and the annoying first standard addition questions will vanish :)

Connect:

1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10

Cracked by: teju , Madhur and udupendra.

teju, Madhur and udupendra

March 25th, today, is Srikanth’s (you know.. the “pompous quiz master who is convinced he is god”) birthday.

Feel free to post your wishes as a comment here!

More stats! and this time, it comes with some eye-candy .

The above chart shows some extended stats for BB user “madhur”. The first pie chart is very simple to understand, but the second may not be obvious. It shows the number of times a user(madhur, in this case) has posted the correct answer first, as compared to the user who has posted the correct answer first the maximum number of times (which is “udupendra”, as of now).

To check out your extended stats, click on the “Hall of fame” link and then click on your user name and of course, the top 5 user’s stats are linked to from the main page..

Thanks to Google Chart API for the super cool graphs.

Well, almost.

We were forced to upgrade our back-end software since we were facing spam bot attacks. This has had in-turn cracked the “Runlengths” and “Round Toppers” scripts. We are working to get them running as soon as possible.

If you face any other problems with BB, please let us know at [email protected]. All help will be appreciated.

Yesterday’s question will be up for some more time, for those of you who were forbidden access when BB was undergoing maintainence.

Update 1:
RSS/ATOM feeds are back online.

Update 2:
Runlengths and Round Toppers are back.

Yes, it’s a glitch in the matrix. Or rather, in BB.

Something’s broken in the image uploader code, so you’re going to see that some images have overwritten some older images. We’re working to restore them as soon as we can..

Till then, If you have time, it’d be really, really helpful for us if you could help us find questions where the images have been overwritten. So, if you feel like doing a little good deed, please send in the paths to the screwed up questions to [email protected]

Oh, your regular question will be posted as usual.

Coincidentally, yesterday’s Annus Mirabilis question brought up another landmark: we’re now up to 200 questions posted here!

So, how’s it been? Any feedback/comments? Please do chip in and let us know…

We have hit a lightyear-stone on BB(a mile is too small a distance at the speed of BB ;) ).

We now have a 100 registered users!
Congrats and welcome to our 100th registered user alakh_niranjan

And also,

duriel has set a new run-length record. He has got 31 cracks in a row, breaking the earlier 28 point record set by sidsen. And the best part is, he is still going strong and showing no signs of breaking it!

jayanth and prasanth (score shows 99, but we have to migrate 1 point from his old user name :) ) have scored 100 points!

Good work guys!

Boiledbeans now comes with customized iPhone home screen logo. Take a look!

Another “Screen Shot”: