"My potatoe is Siberia. Where is it named for?"

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Re: "My potatoe is Siberia. Where is it named for?"

Postby kanewai » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:24 am

100 frogs

The bus driver’s sister is Carl.

Potato

Siberia

… I hate this
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Re: "My potatoe is Siberia. Where is it named for?"

Postby lingua » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:36 am

Where do these questions come from?
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Re: "My potatoe is Siberia. Where is it named for?"

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:42 am

TSS42 wrote:No, seriously... what does that question mean? Is it even English?


Imagine you have a pet potato. These things happen. I had a pet dog but you have a pet potato.
My dog was named Rhubarb. If you asked me "what is my dog named for?" I'd answer "pie".
(That would be a lie, it was named for the plant that an old man gave us so much of since we gave him water to water his plants.)

If your potato was named Siberia. I could ask you what is your 'tater named. Or given that Siberia is a place. I could ask you "Where is it named for?"

You'd answer 'Siberia'.
That's an interesting name for a 'tator.

[queue the banjo music from Deliverance]
Last edited by zenmonkey on Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: "My potatoe is Siberia. Where is it named for?"

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:44 am

lingua wrote:Where do these questions come from?

The dark hole of our leader's mind.
As a way to block spambots.
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Re: "My potatoe is Siberia. Where is it named for?"

Postby lingua » Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:57 am

I'm glad somebody here understands English. Still have the situation where at least two native English speakers made no sense out of it. When I got the bus driver one there was no question. Just the statement so I had no idea how to respond.

Yeah, I knew why we get the questions. italki used to do that with captcha but the photos were crap a lot of the time so I often got them wrong. I was so happy when they finally got rid of it.
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Re: "My potatoe is Siberia. Where is it named for?"

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Jan 07, 2022 8:25 am

TSS42 wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:
TSS42 wrote:No, seriously... what does that question mean? Is it even English?


Imagine you have a pet potato.


Yeah, but when someone is trying to sound really clever with these questions, they probably shouldn't mis-spell 'potato'.


Well, he's kind of archaic or it's the love of the Irish.
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Re: "My potatoe is Siberia. Where is it named for?"

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Jan 07, 2022 8:28 am

lingua wrote:I'm glad somebody here understands English. Still have the situation where at least two native English speakers made no sense out of it. When I got the bus driver one there was no question. Just the statement so I had no idea how to respond.

Yeah, I knew why we get the questions. italki used to do that with captcha but the photos were crap a lot of the time so I often got them wrong. I was so happy when they finally got rid of it.


There are invisible captcha that could possibly solve that but it takes time to implement, test and roll back if it doesn't solve the problem.
We do need a better shibboleth.
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Re: "My potatoe is Siberia. Where is it named for?"

Postby Le Baron » Sat Jan 08, 2022 1:19 am

TSS42 wrote:No, seriously... what does that question mean? Is it even English?


But you passed it though, right? Or did you flunk it and do a different question? I agree it's an odd question, but I think this is the purpose.

I only ever flopped on the bus driver one, but then guessed it out of sheer despair and it worked! I find that my browser saves all the answers anyway so I only need to type the first letter/number and I'm in.
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Re: "My potatoe is Siberia. Where is it named for?"

Postby rdearman » Sat Jan 08, 2022 9:54 am

Well you will be glad to know that I will now need to change all the questions and answers. You see the Q&A has to be something a computer spam bot cannot get the answer from Google. See spam bots are sophisticated nowadays. If the question is just what is 2+8 it can Google the answer, or even what is the square root of 256.

Now that you have posted the answers to the questions on the thread the spam bots can now find out the bus drivers name is Carl. You have no idea how hard it is to come up with a question that most humans know the answer to, or can guess the answer to that Google cannot.

It makes it harder for Google if a word is misspelled because it uses rankings and is trying to give the best answer to the bot request and we're trying to make it unhelpful for the bot.

But don't worry that I am blaming anyone for posting the answers. I have to rotate them periodically because it seems when the spammers can't get their bot to sign-up and post, they visit in person and work out the answers themselves then preload the bot. So they can create thousands of accounts to post from. Luckily we have more than just the captcha method for stopping spam so very little gets through, and what does is reported by the users and removed.

But honestly it is a brain ache to think of an understandable question Google cannot answer.

So if you have a suggestion for some Q&A send me a PM and tell me. Don't post it publicly on the forum because Google scans this forum constantly because we are an authoritative source with a good reputation.
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