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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. If G-Wan is so much better (performance wise), what's holding it back?

I mean other than the licensing and the attitude of its programmer.

Here are some reasons:

  * G-WAN is not open-source, so people (justifiably) resist trying it.
  * It lacks software that takes advantage of the platform.
  * G-WAN gets limited coverage on news sites. (it's banned from Wikipedia for example)
  * People react negatively to the extraordinary claims made by its author without verifying them with the provided benchmark tool

Well some of the claims do appear a bit far fetched and the terms used are really confusing (my bet is that the programmer is non-native speaker).

And it's not banned from Wikipedia, it's just deemed not relevant. But that can't be all, can it?

Other lightweight web servers which fall into the same category as G-WAN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiawatha_(web_server) are still on Wikipedia. No news about any "reliable" references. However, it was not marked for speedy deletion. Don't get me wrong, Hiawatha is a lovely web server. But people on Wikipedia don't use the same measurement for all products.

If you list the claims you feel are far fetched, I can try to provide evidence to support them.

Perhaps far fetched is not the best word to use. The tone of some messages (world's fastest server/web_proxy) is off putting but what really irks me is the totally weird ones: Like units sold for Apple/Mircosoft/Google... What does that prove? Google doesn't sell anything tangible (maybe they sold some Google android phones but that was a one time event).

The first can be proven with the provided benchmarking tool.[1]

As for the second, I agree that the source of those "units sold" should be cited.

[1]http://gwan.ch/source/ab.c

Ok for far fetched statement here is this: https://gist.github.com/2932918

They claim their algorithm is impossible to solve using robots... When it is obvious that it isn't impossible...

That example is easy to solve because it is not using any of the provided techniques that makes it more difficult for robots to solve the CAPTCHA: "changing the HTML background color based on: mouse cursor hovering, previous state or input or shared secret"

The purpose of the example is to give you a basis on which you could implement an effective CAPTCHA.

The claim of "difficult or even completely impossible for robots" applies to CAPTCHAs using the above techniques, which are not used in the example.

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