Wow. I’ve never seen one like that before.

If you’re even remotely interested in captchas you should check out Luis von Ahn’s excellent Google TechTalk on “Human Computation”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

In the first 10 minutes, he explains (among other things) how spammers get people to solve captchas for them. He also has some worrying statistics on Solitaire, and a very cunning plan to label every image on the web.

Ha that’s awesome! That’d be enough to abandon the entire application and look for something else. Hello – there are LEGITIMATE users out there; don’t make them jump through a billion fire-ringed hoops just to keep out the few bad eggs.

Hi there,
It’s interesting hearing all the feedback on the web about our captcha

We put a lot of thought into this design after a denial of service attack saw our premium SMS gateway abused after our old standard looking captcha was compromised. So in an effort to keep the service running smoothly for our loyal users one of our server engineers came up with this design and it’s worked a charm.

I can understand your concerns though, and we are conducting research about any adverse effects it has on our sign up rate so we can weigh up our options. It’s not as complex as it may first appear, it’s just different really. We’ve also taken other things into consideration with the design, such as being friendly to color blind users for example.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Best,
Jambo (ShoZu)