The challenge question in registration is rather tricky!

[chinajobspace]

Just a comment but on trying to register for this forum I found the challenge question rather tricky:

What is 27 + thirteen + 八. Give your answer in numbers

Perhaps easy for someone who is familiar with Chinese number symbols but I just interpreted them as squigly lines. So, I have an awful lot to learn!!

[jbradfor]

There is a challenge question now? roddy, is that new?

[chinajobspace]

It seems a little overkill, a challenge question on top of a image Captcha. Just a newbie, I felt that you might be keeping out plenty of new users who aren't that China savvy yet.

[imron]

Captcha was recently broken and it caused a large uptick in the amount of spam hitting the moderation queue. I believe roddy then added the trickier registration question to solve that problem.

[Hofmann]

I wouldn't do that. Some people can't read. If you want to prevent bots from reading things, try using ｆｕｌｌ－ｗｉｄｔｈ　ｃｈａｒａｃｔｅｒｓ.

[roddy]

Yeah, someone figured out how to get spambots past captchas a month or two back and there was a massive increase in spam - no major impact as it all gets caught in moderation, but it's annoying to have to deal with. So I added the challenge question - spam fell off, although that could have been for other reasons. I didn't notice any plummet in the number of new members turning up and posting. It's just a case of copying 八 into Google and the answer is on the first page. Although someone did seem to struggle.

Have rolled back to just captchas though, will see what happens.

EDIT: Within half an hour we had payday loans and online pharmaceuticals spam, so the challenge question is going up. I might add a hint to the question though.

[Glenn]

I must say, whether it was intentionally obtuse or not, "40 + 八" is a great answer.