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The five-person team behind a simple WordPress plugin, which took three hours to code, never expected to receive worldwide attention as a result. But NRKbeta, the tech-testing group at Norway's largest national media organization, tapped into a meaty vein with the unveiling of last February's Know2Comment, an open source plugin that can attach to any WordPress site's comment section.
"It was a basic idea," NRKbeta developer Ståle Grut told a South By Southwest crowd on Tuesday. "Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it."
[...] NRKbeta took its own advice when a staffer's 2016 article about "pictures of young girls shared on a 'boys forum'" exploded with "shouting and poor discussion" in the comment section. These posts came from readers who don't traditionally visit the NRK's tech-specific subsite, Grut noticed, and his team members decided to write about the rare eruption by asking readers, "What can you learn from meeting the comments section from hell?"
Commenters offered a variety of ideas, which included everything from comment voting to more active moderation. The staff mulled over what they could implement that would be low cost and low impact to its community, and Grut had his own eureka moment while showering before biking to the office: why not a quiz? A WordPress plugin could force users to correctly answer a few multiple-choice questions before the page's comment field would appear. Once he got to the office, he and fellow staffers spent three hours building the plugin, which Grut reminded the crowd is wholly open source.
Source: ArsTechnica
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @05:31PM
Dated? This was one of the first ways of filtering users. Back when people first started putting up roadblocks, then it was abandoned because it was ineffective. There's only so many questions you can have someone create about a single article without making it too difficult for the readers to answer. Once someone brute forces those questions, bots would easily swamp the comment section. Current systems are designed to make that difficult. The people who wrote this are running in circles ignoring the old cons while being solely focused on the pros. That's a main reason why tech goes through so many of the same cycles over and over again.
The method even pre-dates the world wide web. Floppy-based games used DRM based on reading the manual. "What is the 5th word of paragraph 2 on page 6?" You needed a physical copy of the product instead of just a cloned disk to use the software. One of the first things I used the web for was trying to bypass some of those restrictions. If you got a question like "What was the 1st word..." then you could normally guess "The", "A", "When", etc... and eventually get it right.