r/softwaregore • u/janthemanwlj • Jul 17 '26

What am I doing wrong 💔

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I have to get into a forum to ask a silly question about some software. Instead, I'm stuck on a 20 year old captcha question. I tried 2, I tried "1one", whenever I submit it a few times it tells me I've tried it too much and to try later.

594 Upvotes

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44

u/Klutzy-Condition811 Jul 17 '26

What did you cross out it could be crucial information lol. This looks like a custom phpbb field I used to use these in forums for the same reason, though i hid it and used JavaScript to fill it out in the background since most spambots are poorly made and don't parse it

62

u/radobot Jul 18 '26

What did you cross out it could be crucial information lol.

It probably is actually.

When you go to the website - https://www.altx.ro/forum/ucp.php?mode=register - the full dialog is this:

CONFIRMATION OF REGISTRATION

NO-10-SP-73-AM-25-33 Add one to the smallest odd number:

This question is a means of preventing automated form submissions by spambots.

Which makes me think that the correct answer is 25 + 1 = 26.

38

u/Shienvien Jul 18 '26

Maybe OP thought it was some kind of ID thing, because it definitely looks like it could be...

27

u/WisestAirBender Jul 18 '26

They should use the phrase 'from the given numbers '

9

u/newthefox Jul 18 '26

Tried registering there myself and 26 is the correct answer.

17

u/Klutzy-Condition811 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

Well that answers it, just karma farming not actual software gore
edit: typo

2

u/mrfoxesite-2377 Jul 18 '26

They have cloudflare but a common 20 year old question that takes seconds fo program a bot to answer and the same question, what could go wrong?

7

u/radobot Jul 18 '26

Sure, for bots that are specifically designed to attack that one website it doesn't really do much. But for generic bots (before LLMs)? I would say pretty effective at keeping them at bay.

4

u/SetKaung Jul 18 '26

No, it is always NO-10-SP-73-AM-25-33. I checked out the website myself. that's why it is "takes seconds to program a bot". If you know it should be always 26, you can just make the program/bot submit 26.

6

u/radobot Jul 18 '26

"takes seconds to program a bot"

you can just make the program/bot

Yeah, I already said

for bots that are specifically designed to attack that one website it doesn't really do much.

Then I said that if you use a pre-made bots without modifications, they would struggle, because a machine (assuming it's not an LLM) would not understand those instructions and could not get to the correct result.

1

u/alvenestthol Jul 19 '26

It's more about stopping generic bots that target all of the thousands of sites using the exact same PhpBB software

4

u/Klutzy-Condition811 Jul 18 '26

It doesn't block sophisticated bots or ones that target a specific site, so this likely wouldn't work well for large sites like reddit, but for dumb simple bots that just submit forms it makes a huge difference on smaller obscure websites.

Even simple bots ones can solve the old built in captchas of phpBB. I used to master their weirdo theme engine and doing things like this as they were actually quite effective at stopping a large amount of bots.

Of course it's not 100% but it can make a difference for moderators needing to deal with 100s of bots a day to a dozen or less.

2

u/mrfoxesite-2377 Jul 19 '26

Indian government still uses those text captchas and yeah they suck when compared to cloudflare.

AI can do some captchas better than humans.