"Probably not for a long time"... I don't think she really believed me though since I had gone through a TI-99/4A, C-64, and 8088 (Hyundai Blue Chip - I think) before that.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

Ah Jeese, that reminds me - think it was '87 -had to buy a math co-processor chip for an 8088 to run AutoCad. It cost $600 and change to turn it into an 8087 (why the reduced digit has always been beyond me). I do remember that the machine itself cost $2,400 or so, an Indiana 500 4MHz (turbo 8MHz) 10 megabyte HD with 512K ram.

The chip burned out after 8 months.

Naw, simpler solution for me, I just wont use it.
H

I don't really want to read through all of this right now. I'm not sure where the idea of charging for this comes in. There is a free service that provides hundreds of thousands of questions that are constantly being updated, plus each gameop could add their own questions if they like. It's already in TW, just not active. The point of it would be to require a human to be at keys when a game starts, and also to periodically challenge a player over time to verify that it's a human actually playing. Settings could be used to target what the anti-bot system is trying to limit.

The questions are things like "How many letters are in the word 'red'?", things that anyone can answer but that are difficult for a bot to process.

This has been available for awhile, but I'm not going to activate it until I have a gameop or two who is expressing interest in it. We've discussed it here a bit but I didn't have anyone come to me and say "I'd really like to use this", so I didn't turn it on. If I get that, I'll let those gameops explore it and see how it goes.

I understand what capcha is. My questions were:

#1 Will using this service cause any additional connection latency?

#2 Since I'm presuming this is an added value service, will there be a fee for this service, either absorbed by EIS, or passed on to players or sysops?

False assumption = gateway (this is apart of twgs, no gateway)

No

Free, already in TWGS, just not active

H

No and no. As far as I know, the only concerns are a) will it actually discourage aggressive scripters and b) will it be too much of a nuisance for everyone else.

So I write a script to send the question to my cell phone. Next?

I would like to give it a try.

Won't matter. If you can respond fast enough that way to get the question answered you are effectively at keys.
H

No and Yes

Would you though? TWX doesn't support that option Nativity, and while you write in Java I assume a large majority don't. Are you intending on releasing said script public?

I think a) no, and b) yes, it will break immersion.

I side against reactive scripting and botting. But somebody will.

There's no harm in exploring it. Like I said, the question I have isn't so much "can it be overcome" as, "is it really worth the trouble".