

I Hate Captcha- Come beta test my alternative - kapauldo

I am getting ready to launch BaffleBot, a captcha alternative.  In a nutshell, it's a picture/question combo challenge, and the challenges are submitted by humans.  It's monetized with a small ad, with revenue share for bloggers, and challenge creators are rewarded with a link shown in every challenge.  So, if you want to contribute or check it out, please go www.bafflebot.com.  If you are a WordPress blogger, I'd especially appreciate it if you would install the plugin and give me feedback on how well it works.  The beta code is "baffleboy" (all lower case). Send me an email if you have any questions or comments (kapauldo AT gmail.com).<p>Thanks,
Kevin
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bjonathan
Hi, I just connected to your website and the first "bafflebot" submit to me is
"what is this character's name" (a yellow bird) I'm from France, I dont know
all the US kid cartoons so I cant answer to that captcha.. Whereas 1+2 or
"enter the word" is pretty universal.

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

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mikeknoop
Male vs female is a poor test because you can guess correctly about 50% of the
time. Thats on par with some current CAPTCHA bots.

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emzo
It's also not so good for the visually impaired because you can't really
provide an audio version of the challenge, whereas identifying the letters in
a random string is easier to present as audio.

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togasystems
Do captcha bots ever use the audio string? Could you not hook up a voice
recognizer to the audio portion?

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marknutter
I hate to say it, but I think this is a huge step in the wrong direction.
First, there appear to be multiple correct answers for almost all the
challenges. One showed a picture of a woman watering plants that appeared to
have dollar bills as leaves. It asked me what she was doing. I had no clue
what to put; is she "watering plants," "growing money," or just "watering?". I
think you should at least provide multiple choice answers, even if the user
has to enter in the full answer word for word. Forget about spam bots being
able to figure these out, most humans would have a hard time!

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.

~~~
kapauldo
yeah, the ads right now are low quality, but remember, the ads are revenue
shared with the blogger. so it's a way to monetize your comments. if it gets
traction, i'll be experimenting with deals, coupons, localized offers, etc.
the current ads are really just there as a placeholder.

~~~
marknutter
My advice is to be selective with your advertising partners. It still seems
like an odd place to have ads, but if they were more tasteful or I had a say
in what they were, I might be more inclined to use it. That said, it strikes
me as a very odd revenue stream. If it were me, I would concentrate on making
this the captcha of choice and _then_ focus on monetization. The ads seem like
they might kill off any chance of this happening.

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bl4k
How many different questions do you have? I ran it ~20 times and saw the same
question 4-5 of those times.

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.

~~~
kapauldo
right now there is a set of seed data on there. there will hopefully be new
challenges being entered every day, then i plan to use a quarantine, IP
logging, etc. strategies to prevent catalog attacks. this is crowd sourced, so
ihope to have a lot of people contributing challenges and grow the catalog
base. also, i've got image mogrification working, so after a few days of use,
each challenge can be modified to prevent automated catalog attacks.

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watty
Overall I thought it was great. I went through about 20 questions and got them
all right. I also went through them about twice as fast as Captchas and I
probably would have missed a few too.

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...](http://www.tropicalbirding.com/tripReports/TR_SouthIndia_Nov2006/WEB-
Malabar-Lark--Goa.jpg) which was interesting but not a correct answer.

~~~
kapauldo
The human submitters get to see what answers people have submitted. So, they
can see that you typed "yellow car" and then decide if that is a legitimate
answer. It's all crowd sourced. If you submit a challenge, you OWN that
challenge, and you can see your hit and fail rates.

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pbhogan
Thoughts: ugly and mostly useless.

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.

~~~
VladRussian
like with email (where spam fighting has been quite successful) submitted
posts should be run through spam-filters.

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jackowayed
I definitely agree that the need is there. This was me when setting up google
apps recently <http://twitter.com/jackowayed/status/22408310028>

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...](http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha.pdf)

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ihumanable
Allowing the person that writes the answer to submit a link is problematic,
IMHO. Of the 3 I tried, 2 said "I love you" and linked to Glenn Beck. I
personally dislike Mr. Beck very much, and that alone would keep me from using
this on any project.

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.

~~~
kapauldo
that link was submitted by an alpha tester. he submitted one of the
picture/question challenges, and in exchange, he gets rewarded impressions of
his link.

~~~
secret
I think you missed his/her point though. Captchas should prevent spam,
allowing a user to include an arbitrary link that will appear on any random
site is not much of an improvement to the site owner.

~~~
kapauldo
Yeah, but this problem already exists on WordPress comments for example.
People are free to add whatever link they want with their comments. I don't
think a Glen Beck link is spam, (though I do personally think he's a gimmick).

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nailer
Hi Kevin,

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.

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michael_dorfman
What are you doing with the data you collect?

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

~~~
kapauldo
i only collect answer data for the purposes of improving responses, nothing
else. (not a huge fan of luis von ahn, for reasons i'll keep to myself).

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gyardley
Publishers likely won't want the sort of user leakage that comes from an
offsite link.

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>

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jasonlotito
<http://www.bafflebot.com> \- clickable

beta code: baffleboy

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maxdemarzi
Hum... yellow car. I entered Camaro told it was wrong. Was it a Chevelle? Are
you using a semantic dictionary to decide if the answer was right or wrong or
a predefined word list?

~~~
byoung2
_Hum... yellow car. I entered Camaro told it was wrong. Was it a Chevelle?_

It is clearly a Mustang Mach 1...'69 or '70
([http://www.bafflebot.com/challenges/main_image/39a43dd6d6e34...](http://www.bafflebot.com/challenges/main_image/39a43dd6d6e347721b65745503a874a1ebd2ca8d)
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).

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matt2224
Not a bad idea, but some of the questions + pictures I've got have just been
plain stupid. One was of a character which I had never seen, let alone know
the name of.

"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.

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tjansen
Less annoying than most traditional captchas, I think it may cause problems
for international users. You are asking for relatively specific words (I noted
pencil, saw and puzzle) that not everybody will know. Also, the pencil
sharpener on one challenge is not a common type in Europe AFAIK.

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).

~~~
kapauldo
i definitely have to add country codes for localization. the reason i'm using
pictures is because everyone some of the challenges are from photos, but i
grabbed a bunch of royalty-free clipart for the seed data. a few of my early
testers did upload photos, and they work fine too.

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tomjen3
This is no good for those of us who aren't native English speakers - I keep
getting the words wrong (writing English is not that beg of a problem as small
errors doesn't destroy the readers understanding and if you don't know a word,
hey use another), and my English is better than 70% of the rest of my country.

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

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muxxa
Hmmm, I think a major problem is going to be culturally specific questions.
E.g. I got a picture of 'Big Bird'. I'd imagine that this would be easy for
most beta testers who are likely to be of a certain demographic and from a
country where Sesame Street was aired, but it's going to be baffling for
everyone else, as well as giving a feeling of being excluded.

~~~
matt2224
Yes, I got several which were impossible for me to answer.

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trebor
I was checking out a few of your "baffles" and ran into a bug. After clicking
refresh a few times I got stuck on a puzzle piece; the caption and description
said to refresh it, but it just returned to the "please refresh".

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

(In Safari 5.0.1)

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jdietrich
I'm au fait with US culture, but I got it wrong about a quarter of the time,
which is no better than reCaptcha.

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jerome_etienne
Your stuff is not culture free. It requires knowledge which may be or not
known by people. This knowledge may be obvious to you but people are quite
different all around the world. Usually captcha is about copying numbers.
Arabic numerals is way more wide-spread than english language.

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js4all
When I read the title, I was hoping to see a real alternative to captchas.
What I see is not that different (pictures vs. letter/numbers)

Something revolutionary different is needed.

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muxxa
There's going to be problems with spelling and phrasing -

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

or 'a jigsaw', 'jigsaw'

etc

~~~
kapauldo
the human in charge of maintaining that challenge will see answers come in and
decide to accept them. If you sign up for an account, you'll get a dashboard,
which shows you stats on all of your challenges, how many impressions you
have, etc.

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jbhelms
when I went to go sign up this is what i saw: <http://imgur.com/QGEhB.png>

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

~~~
kapauldo
thanks for the catch, i really appreciate the screen cap!

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lurkinggrue
Where can I see this actually working?

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kapauldo
You can see it on Pikk.com and on my blog kapauldo.com.

