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StackOverflow is Testing You

Last updated on 2018-11-07

Sometimes, to clear up my head, I go to StackOverflow and review some edits (yes, I’m that kind of person…). Couple of small tasks with relatively low complexity and also giving back to the community. Sometimes I even learn interesting stuff.

Usually I take 4-5 suggested edits, check them, and return to my regular tasks. Most edits are standard, fixing some spelling problem, indentation, or code marking. But today I got a really strange edit:

The title just didn’t make sense. It looked as if things were added and deleted randomly. I went to the question and it was OK before, so I guessed that the edit was some kind of bot or other malicious entity created by an evil mind that wants to destroy the world. So I rejected the edit, setting “vandalism” as the rejection reason.

What happened next was a surprise:

I guess there are many people going through the review queue and clicking accept/reject without much thought, just to get more karma points. So the guys at StackOverflow are now checking that you pay attention when you are doing the reviews.

These guys are awesome!!!

 

Published inProgramming

One Comment

  1. Great! This is actually kind of “captcha”. On crowd sourcing or “human computation” you should make sure the crowd is doing what it suppose to do…
    I wish Facebook will confirm all the fake likes by such traps.

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