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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • why use.perl and some suggestions... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hossman (2110) on 2002.04.19 2:24 (#7278)
    The images seem to be gone now (i saw it on the comments form before, I just didn't accutally post a comment) but I'd like to go ahead and toss out a few things that have been on my mind while reading this thread so far...

    • why use.perl.org? Wouldn't slashcode.com [slashcode.com] have been a better place to beta test this, and seek peoples opinions about it? (maybe it was beta'ed there as well, but i didn't notice it, or a discussion about it)
      It's not that big of an issue, I'm just curious more then anything.
    • why are people so worked up about this? Does it prevent access from text based browsers, yes. Does it make slash hard to use for the blind, yes. is it a narrow minded feature, yes? DO i think it's a very effective deterant, no. Is it something that all slash sites will have to use, no. Is it something slashcode will come with defaulting to on, i hope not. Is it something use.perl is going to use permanently, pudge said no at the same time he accounced them.
      This is an optional feature folks, and I can't believe how many people from a programming community are up in arms about the creation of a feature to a piece of software. If you don't think the feature should be used fine, say so -- but come on people, there's no reason to bite pudge's head off just 'cause the code exists.
    • I hope the slash team considers the comments so far with an open mind. If you sift through the negativity, there's some decent suggestions (i particularly liked the idea of admins being able to disable it on a per user basis if a particular trusted user has special needs)
    • Lastly, I'd like to suggest that the slash team that there are alternative ways of doing this that don't require images. with the "antispamification" of email addresses, you've allready created a masterpiece of text based obvuscation. I'm constantly amazed at the multitudes of methods used to scramble up an address, such that i can still tell what it should be, but a script wouldn't (unless it was highly specialized, and then it wouldn't work on the next 99 addresses, why not base your validation on the same type of ascii-obfustcation? printing out a random (fake) scrambled email address and asking the user to descramble it is just one of lots of "ascii games" that can be played -- not to mention other simple questions that can be generated automaticly, but would be semi-complicated for a computer to parse (especially if it didn't know what type of question to expect) ... "what is ten plus three?", "hoW maNy UpercaSE VoweLs in THiS sEnTence?", etc...
      sure, people could write scripts to crack all of these brute force ... but they could write scripts to brute force OCR as well. (And i know which one i would consider more entertaining and browser compatible)

    • "Is it something slashcode will come with defaulting to on, i hope not."

      I can upgrade that answer to "no" -- the default Slash theme will only ship with the minimal plugins that are required for its proper operation, and I can't see HumanConf ever being one of them.

      "I hope the slash team considers the comments so far with an open mind. If you sift through the negativity, there's some decent suggestions (i particularly liked the idea of admins being able to disable it on a per user basis if a particul

    • Why is it a "big issue"?

      Well, if a problem exists, and the provided solution hoses blind people, then blind people will be hosed. If you believe blind people shouldn't be hosed, then perhaps developers should provide different solutions.

      If there's going to be a better solution that doesn't have such side effects, then why waste time on the broken solution at all?

      I was also going to suggest the "riddle" idea - if you're willing to keep the riddle generators secret, it should provide decent human verifica
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