Page 1 of 1

2012 Free Day is no fun...

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2012 10:07 am
by wholder
Well, after spending an hour typing meaningless text, I decided to stop. There's still plenty of money left, but it's just not worth my time to sit here on a work day doing a totally boring task, over and over and over and over just to get $100. To all the rest of you, I wish you the best. But, honestly, this year's contest was just completely uninspired, in my opinion. The system seemed to work ok, which I guess is an advance, but typing in Capchas was not only tedious, but completely frustrating for several reasons. One, I'm not a touch typist (yes, Mom, I should have practiced.) Two, many of the images presented to me ([perhaps 30%), were so garbled that could only guess at what I was being asked to type. Three, Capchas? Really? Geez. Maybe some electronic trivia, or something interesting to think about. But, Capchas? Sorry, that's just a completely stupid idea.

Re: 2012 Free Day is no fun...

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2012 11:01 am
by Comrad_Durandal
Captchas are kind of dull - they could have made a way to alternate between those, trivia questions, taking them to a random page - asking the user if they have purchased one before, novel kind of things like that. People -do- seem to be winning, but perhaps some ideas for next time?

Re: 2012 Free Day is no fun...

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2012 11:19 am
by dxh
1) The captchas are such poor quality, I have gotten eye strain and I am getting a headache. I get that your trying to avoid machine reading, but bhy in the world do they have to use captchas that even humans can not read!?

2) There is a way to game their supposedly randomizer. Apparently if you watch the webcam there is a train in the office with red paint that triggers the geiger counter when it goes by. Of course those of us behind a work firewall today have no chance to see that train or the ustream feed at all.

Kinda lame actually.

Re: 2012 Free Day is no fun...

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2012 11:36 am
by n1ist
I keep getting images that are equations, formulas, or in foreign languages...
/mike

Re: 2012 Free Day is no fun...

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2012 12:10 pm
by DeadlyFoez
Yeah, it was no fun, but after 2 1/2 hours and about 2500 captcha tries I finally won. First time I've won in the 3 years that I've tried. I was starting to get depressed that I might not win.

Part of the reason for using captcha was so the site didn't get so lagged down like it did in previous years. Last year I tried for like 5 hours, got 2 trivia questions answered and had won $20, but then I could not load the page again and somehow I lost the $20 that I had won. I was pretty ticked off because of it, but now I am happy again.

Thank you SparkFun!!!

Re: 2012 Free Day is no fun...

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2012 2:33 pm
by Comrad_Durandal
DeadlyFoez wrote:Yeah, it was no fun, but after 2 1/2 hours and about 2500 captcha tries I finally won. First time I've won in the 3 years that I've tried. I was starting to get depressed that I might not win.

Part of the reason for using captcha was so the site didn't get so lagged down like it did in previous years. Last year I tried for like 5 hours, got 2 trivia questions answered and had won $20, but then I could not load the page again and somehow I lost the $20 that I had won. I was pretty ticked off because of it, but now I am happy again.

Thank you SparkFun!!!
Congratulations - you earned it. I think what we are trying to constructively say is there needs to be a more -fun- and fair way to do it - Endless CAPTCHAs of Death is so boring - it's very fair...but terribly terribly boring. I won't be doing Free Day in the future if this is what it will be from now on.

Re: 2012 Free Day is no fun...

Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2012 1:25 pm
by CS Paul
Comrad_Durandal wrote:... if this is what it will be from now on.
It definitely won't be like this again. Assuming there are future Free Days, to change it up every time is a rule.

Re: 2012 Free Day is no fun...

Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2012 7:53 am
by mutsop
I have to agree on this,

It wasn't fun at all... In total I spend more than 3 hours without luck. If I made some research I might have doubled the speed of typing and also my chance on winning. To be honest I find that you guys haven't made it fair to most of us.

For those who are not familiar with what I'm talking: apparently you only need to type the word that is less visible and for the other one you can simply type 1 letter.

In total my speeds could have gone up by 40% at least. Not counting the times I just skipped cause of the formulas or unknown symbols.

You guys should have posted this on the front page where you had the recaptcha.

Congratz though to those who won :)

Re: 2012 Free Day is no fun...

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2012 6:54 am
by phalanx
mutsop wrote:To be honest I find that you guys haven't made it fair to most of us.
Considering the requirements were the same for anyone trying to get a bite of the Free Day pie, I fail to see how the system could be unfair to anyone let alone be unfair to most but not all.

-Bill

Re: 2012 Free Day is no fun...

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2012 3:22 pm
by mutsop
phalanx wrote: Considering the requirements were the same for anyone trying to get a bite of the Free Day pie, I fail to see how the system could be unfair to anyone let alone be unfair to most but not all.
-Bill
might be, but it's kind of disappointing thought to know you might have doubled the chances on winning :)
I'm not here to argue or anything, I mean you guys are great don't get me wrong... I mean giving away 200k$ :D

Regards