At 8:47 PM -0600 4/8/03, John Constantinescu wrote:
They're generally insulting and usually inappropriate.
Yes, I agree. server generated turing tests are insulting.
that is why, in my system, the duty falls to the user to create
their own fun interesting test. In fact people love to personalize
their stuff (sig lines,
This doesn't make it less insulting or inappropriate. No matter how
you mask it, it's a "game" that I have to play in order to talk to
you. It implicitly assumes that your time is more important than
mine, and that my message is less important to you than avoiding
spam. As I have said extensively in the archives--there is a
mistaken assumption in C/R. It assumes that you care less about
receiving the message than I care about sending it. There are many,
many cases where this is not true.
unsolicited because they read something I wrote. I spend time answering
them, and then they want me to play some stupid game for the priviledge.
I never bother, and never will.
This is a specific case. You the sender are inconvinienced, and the
user of this system never got your response. they just think you
never sent it. The user experiences no inconvinience. that is the
point of the system. I decide I dont want to deal with people that
don't want to deal with me.
If the only thing you care about is inconveniencing the receiver,
then you've completely missed the point. Email involves multiple
people, you can't think about only one of them. Why not just delete
their email program? Then they'll *never* be inconvenienced.
In my system, the "challenge" is similar to me sending a "thanks for
emailing me" message back, then you sending a "your welcome". In
fact the Challenge could say thanks, and then ask the question.
You're trying to put roses on a pile of garbage. The fact remains,
if I don't play the game, you aren't going to read my email. Turning
it into a cutesy game is actually worse. If you're going to do it,
do it cleanly. I'd far rather interpret some word in a graphic than
sit there trying to figure out what obscure historical figure some
idiot picked out for me to guess. *Especially* if the reason I'm
contact the person is to do them a favor.
That is an impimentation decision. a good system might have a
special tool to handle mailing lists.
???!! You clearly weren't hear last week when everyone who posted to
the list got a challenge from someone on the list. Dealing with
mailing lists isn't an "implementation detail". It is something that
has to be designed into the system from the very start. If you
haven't figured out how to deal with mailing lists, bounce messages,
vacation notices, challenges that respond with challenges from other
similar systems and other automated email, then you need to go back
and do some more thinking. These aren't options--they are
requirements of the real world.
Mail delivery needs to occur without human intervention.
Mail begins and ends with people.
Trite, but not useful in the real world. Especially when you get
that automated notice from your ISP telling you that your credit card
is about to expire and you need to give them a new one.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg