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Author Topic: To Whom It May Concern  (Read 3157 times)

Offline lostassets

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To Whom It May Concern
« on: April 08, 2014, 07:52:11 am »
I found UFO:AI while surfing the internet and thought, "Wow! A Linux/Win Open Source project." I install the game to one of my Linux boxes and started playing and found the game much improved over the original 90's version. I am impressed. Then I thought, I have 30+ years of variety programming languages across several OS, maybe I could lend a hand. I looked over the code and Lua and C++ is great languages to work a game. I speak both English and German so I was guessing I had to offer. My life as a semi-retired CEO of EDE has been getting rather dull lately. I mean look at this, I am up at 2 AM typing on a forum nothing really to do.

So last night feeling very good about this project, I came here to register. I entered my ID (it wasn't this one), password, CAPTCHA code and... Duke's Girlfriend??? I searched and I searched. Then this old man got tired and went to bed. I finally got up today and ran my best searching bot on your forum. After I came home, the program finally got the name for me.

I would like to inform you, since last night I changed my position and decided to head in a new direction. Obviously this is a rather immature move on my part assuming I was dealing with professionals. Thank you for the opportunity, but at this time, I am seeking other professional and personal development. I only wish could have found what I was looking for here. I wish you the best of luck.


Sincerely,



 
Brian Black

Offline ShipIt

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Re: To Whom It May Concern
« Reply #1 on: April 08, 2014, 09:13:41 am »
tl, dr

Offline Duke

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Re: To Whom It May Concern
« Reply #2 on: April 08, 2014, 09:18:29 am »
Hi Brian,
your approach was a little bit below standard. You may want to read this:
http://ufoai.org/forum/index.php/topic,8522.0.html

After cleaning up 26,000 spam registrations manually you become rather creative, you know ...

Offline kurja

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Re: To Whom It May Concern
« Reply #3 on: April 11, 2014, 11:04:01 pm »
It can be somewhat... elusive, though. Could the hint be brought a little closer, maybe the hint "look at the forum" could link to an appropriate thread, for an example?

I don't know how smart these bots can be, if the answer was spelled out on the same page only worded differently would they get in?

Offline Duke

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Re: To Whom It May Concern
« Reply #4 on: April 11, 2014, 11:22:01 pm »
Either in the thread I linked above or somewhere else on these forums I already mentioned that the bots have *human* assistants. So the questions has to be difficult even for humans in order to keep those assistants out.

We've had many/enough new users since that question has been set up. And losing some potential users that are not willing/able to spend some thought on the registration riddle should raise the average quality of the posts here ;)