Cape Town sees launch of IQAPTCHA

Cape Town-based Henk Kleynhans (of Skyrove) and Joe Botha (of TrustFabric) today announced that they have launched IQAPTCHA, a new service they've been working on for the past year.

This new service is called IQAPTCHA, and, similar to a CAPTCHA (which allows blogs and websites to see if a commenter is human), IQAPTCHA is designed to make it easy to verify that a commentator is intelligent, or can make intelligent comments.

Kleynhans and Botha invented this product after becoming jaded with what they regarded as the low quality of comments by readers on MoneyWeb, news24.com and timeslive.co.za, three of their favourite online publications.

IQAPTCHA is designed to understand online reputation, but for new users it will do basic language checks to begin with, and may ask a short and simple (to smart people) question or two.

Says Kleynhans: "If you answer it incorrectly, you will be given another chance to answer a second, but slightly more difficult question.

"In this way, the only way for unintelligent comments to appear would be if an unwanted reader works all night trying to find out the answers to the questions. We hope they will eventually give up or smarten up enough to leave a constructive comment."

In addition to integrating traditional IQ test-like questions, the system will also combine smart heuristics. Says Botha: "Gone are the days of having to manually remove comments left by 'muppets'. Comments that are racist, bigoted or simply not well thought out will no longer be a problem. By letting the community vote up or down comments, IQAPTCHA learns what qualifies as good comments and can pattern recognise inappropriate ones without having to make the user fill out the IQAPTCHA'd questions."

IQAPTCHA will be available as a free service for non-commercial blogs but at a price per comment IQaptcha for commercial websites. IQAPTCHA is said to be easy to integrate into any existing online publication or content management system. It is currently in Beta.

For more information, go to www.IQAPTCHA.com.

Update 6 April 2010 at 10.32am: note that this is an April Fool's joke.