Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

With questions like these "What is the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything?" you will miss out on people who don't understand the context of the question. With easy mathematical questions (how much is one + two) everybody who is capable to read your question is able to answer them. With questions like "What is the name of the object which looks like a chest but has hundreds of feet" you miss out on everybody who hasn't read the Disc-world series. Or who isn't capable of deciphering your forms and finding the answer in the spam_answer input field.

Posted by Edwin Groothuis at Thu Jan 10 01:32:52 2008

Q: who's your daddy? A: Philip

Posted by Dries at Thu Jan 10 06:12:52 2008

@Edwin: this is by design. :-)  I have high expectations of my readership.  Most of the questions should either put a smile on the face of the reader and the answer should occur at once or the answer should be trivial to find or work out.

The trickier questions keep the quality of the comments high.  A (f)lamer is not going to bother looking up the answer to the CAPTCHA to post that I suck.  Someone with something genuinely interesting to say will on the other hand take the trouble.

I like the chest-question.  Added. :-)

@Dries: I'm fairly sure I have no children.  I also have no plans in that area. :-)

Posted by Philip Paeps at Thu Jan 10 08:41:58 2008

I had to refresh a few times in order to get an easy solvable captcha. (Easy as in: look it up in wikipedia)

So a difficult captcha is no real problem if enough easy captchas are available.

Posted by wannes at Thu Jan 10 08:49:30 2008

@Wannes: yes, there are a couple of very trivial ones in there. :-)

Posted by Philip Paeps at Thu Jan 10 10:35:44 2008

"What is the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything?"
should accept the answer "forty-two"...

Posted by Bobson at Fri Jan 11 01:14:37 2008