Forum CAPTCHA process is broken

Brian Callahan bcallah at openbsd.org
Thu Aug 7 01:40:59 UTC 2025


Not sure where to post this, but the forum CAPTCHA process could 
stand to be improved. The forum thought my latest post was spam 
so presented me with the following CAPTCHA challenge asking what 
does this function return:

```
string n()
{
     return format("d=%02X", 24);
}
```

And provided a helpful hint that you can run code online at 
https://run.dlang.io/ if you don't have a local D compiler.

Of course, this won't compile as-is, as it is missing `import 
std.format;` and then after that you'll get a linker error 
stating there's no `main` function.

The CAPTCHA should read:

```
import std.format;
import std.stdio;

string n()
{
     return format("d=%02X", 24);
}

void main()
{
     writeln(n);
}
```

Or something to that effect; maybe inline `n()` into `main()` and 
ask what the program outputs rather than asking what the function 
returns.

Could many of us look at the original function and know off the 
top of our heads that `n()` returns the string "d=18"? Probably 
yes. But consider the newcomer to D (or programming in general) 
who is going to paste the CAPTCHA code into run.dlang.io, get an 
error message, and have a bad experience with D before they even 
really started.

I think having a little D code in the CAPTCHA is great and 
different, but it should be something that you can paste into 
run.dlang.io and get an output that you can paste right back into 
the box.

Just my 2 cents.

~Brian


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