We spent 10 months building a gamified alternative to reCAPTCHA. Now we are trapped in the "Zero-Review" algorithm.

Hey everyone,

For the last 10 months, my team has been building a completely new architectural approach to form security and bot mitigation.

We identified two critical flaws in the current landscape:

The Conversion Friction: Forcing legitimate human buyers to solve image puzzles creates a high cognitive load that actively hurts conversion rates.
The Telemetry Failure: "Invisible" CAPTCHAs (like reCAPTCHA v3 or Turnstile) attempt to solve the friction issue by silently harvesting behavioral telemetry (mouse tracking, IP reputation). However, modern headless scripts are increasingly bypassing these metrics using residential proxies and noise injection, while the silent data harvesting introduces significant GDPR liabilities.
The Architecture we built to solve this: We abandoned behavioral tracking entirely and built a Gamified Proof-of-Work (PoW) CAPTCHA. Instead of tracking user behavior, the form presents a 2-second HTML5 micro-game. While the user interacts with it, their browser solves a heavy cryptographic equation in the background. It destroys the economic viability of bulk bot attacks (like WooCommerce card testing) without relying on surveillance. We also engineered it to validate locally using HMAC, meaning it adds zero TTFB latency to form submissions.

The Problem we are facing today: The tech is solid. The architecture works. We just launched the WordPress plugin to the official repository.

But we have hit the ultimate cold-start problem: Nobody installs a WordPress plugin with 0 reviews.

It’s a brutal catch-22. We can’t run paid ads efficiently because store owners see 0 reviews and bounce. We can’t acquire organic search traffic in the WP directory without active installs and ratings.

The Ask: We are looking for our first 5 "pioneer" users. If you run a WordPress site, use WooCommerce, Elementor, or WPForms, and you want to move away from image puzzles and behavioral tracking—we would love for you to test our gamified architecture.

If the UX is bad or it breaks your flow, tell me directly so we can fix it. But if it works smoothly and secures your endpoints, an honest review on the WP directory would quite literally save our launch.

You can check out the plugin (and play the games) here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/conversion-business-captcha/

Happy to answer any questions about how we engineered the local HMAC validation or the polymorphic UI to prevent DOM scripting!