Second try, I have in front of me a red apple with legs and arms and the question is "what is it?" The question is wayyyyy to broad, what should I answer? is it another cartoon that I'm not aware of? is it an apple? a red apple?...

A captcha must be VERY simple and universal.

I read a few months ago a good captcha idea, a picture of a human and the challenge is to say if it's a man or a female. A bot cant read the picture well enough, but the human eye/brain is trained to identify a man or a female in less than a second!

My 2cents, good luck with your project. I agree captcha generally sucks

A real person would instantly recognize one of their friends and even the guy getting paid to solve captchas would have a hard time.

Of course, you then have the problem of getting someone to connect FB to the CAPTCHA service for the first time instead of abandoning the form.

Second, and this is a big one, I don't think there are many bloggers and web developers out there who are so frustrated with captchas that they'd be willing to use an ad-supported system, no matter how easy it makes things for the end user. I know I wouldn't. The ads also add a lot of confusion to the captcha. Again, on the money plant watering example, I saw an ad about making cash online. Combined with the strange money tree it made for a very confusing experience at best. I think having the same crap that spambots are likely to post on a site as advertisements on the very captcha that is trying to prevent it sends some pretty mixed signals.

Third, why does this need to be crowd-sourced? This seems like it's adding myriad quality control issues. I think if you sat down and came up with 10 or so internationally universal puzzles that are easily solved by all humans and not by robots, you would have enough variety to keep the bots guessing.

What I want to see is a captcha that determines I'm human without me having to do anything. I don't even know if this can be done, but to me all captcha solutions should be aiming toward that goal. In the meantime, I'll deal with the captchas that are out there right now.

One problem you might have is that classical captcha has 25^6 combinations, and you can generate a new set every x days by changing the algorithm used to generate the images.

Your set is human generated, and it seems that it wouldn't take long to build an answer set to use to break it, especially since it gives you a second and third chance at an answer.

A spammer could build a 'quiz' site with your questions and answers, and store the image hashes along with the answers in a db.

I agree with the other posters though that it needs to be a bit more forgiving with spelling and adjectives. "Yellow Car" and "Red Apple" should both be accepted. I never saw Big Bird but if you decided to keep it, "bird" and "yellow bird" should be correct unfamiliar users.

I tried to use tineye.com to see if a spammer could automate searches to determine what the picture is of (obviously wouldn't work on all pictures though) and it failed for 'car' and 'pencil'. Google Googles on my phone identified the bird as a Lark: http://www.tropicalbirding.com/tripReports/TR_SouthIndia_Nov... which was interesting but not a correct answer.

The problem is not beating bots. There are all kinds of ways of achieving that (some fairly effective ones without even requiring user interaction).

The hard one is stopping an outsourced third-world cubicle farm of human spam submitters. Solve that one and you're on to something.

Since people really have no way to know what kind of challenges you offer, it would be good if you had some screenshots/demos on your homepage instead of a generic "private beta" page.

You also might want to think about doing things like Google's image rotation captcha experiments. I was really excited when they announced that they were playing with those because I was hoping they'd kill traditional captchas. Here's a PDF of a paper by some Googlers: http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha...

You are going to run afoul of people just as easily if someone links to Keith Olbermann, or a site about Gay Rights, or kicking out immigrants, or atheism, or the KKK, or [insert inflammatory thing here].

The whole reason for captcha's is so someone can't put arbitrary links on YOUR site, embedding your anti-captcha solution just makes sure they are always in the same place. No thanks, I'll just use ReCaptcha.

I like this, some feedback:

* Asides from the cultural challenges (I don't know who big bird is either) these are mostly better experiences to solve than captcha.

* The submit button is outside the rectangle. It's not visually part of the bafflebot area.

* Have a pay option with no ads. Let people pay per 1000 provided challenges, perhaps upfront. The ads are distracting and I run my own ads on my site, but I'd be happy to pay something reasonable for a captcha alternative

Overall, I think it works. Drop the cultural stuff, let me pay, and make it better looking and you'll have yourself a customer.

I assume you're trying to followi in the footsteps of Luis Van Ahn... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvVAViDtKeA

The most interesting CAPTCHA innovation I've seen recently is from AdCopy, who replace it with an advertisement that contains an answer the user must then provide - guaranteeing that the user pay attention to the ad. A portion of the revenue gets paid to the publisher, turning the CAPTCHA into a revenue stream.

Sample here: http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/savetsl/captcha

beta code: baffleboy

It is clearly a Mustang Mach 1...'69 or '70 (http://www.bafflebot.com/challenges/main_image/39a43dd6d6e34... vs http://www.classiccarstudio.com/images/auction/1166/1.jpg)

I got one that could have been a rat or a mouse...hard to tell, but both were accepted. Same with the bird picture, bird and sparrow were accepted. But the picture of the corvette with the question "how many wheels does this object likely have?" is ambiguous. It could be 4, 5 (counting the spare tire), or 6 (if you're cheeky and count the steering wheel).

"What are these beds called?"

There are about 4 separate names for bunk/cabin beds.

Typos are another issue. "Where do you where these things?" Also, how the hell can you expect people to answer such a vague question?

I have to say that I think this is both harder, and less accessible than a traditional CAPTCHA.

Idea: why aren't you using photos instead of vector graphics? They are also much easier to create (and more difficult for a machine to recognize, especially if you add some random noise).

This will go where all the other captcha replaces have gone - nowhere, sadly.

I've repeated this 3x now; it appears to occur after the first reload.

(In Safari 5.0.1)

Something revolutionary different is needed.

e.g. 'sewing machine', 'sowing machine', 'sewing'

or 'a jigsaw', 'jigsaw'

etc

I would suggest not using that banner on that page. While one could just click hide, it is just one more step for a user to say "nah, why bother".

BTW, that was in FireFox 3.6.8 on Windows 7 Professional