Hi Product Hunt! I'm very happy to share Turing's Gate, a free forum with a built-in action-adventure fish game called The Pond. No ads, your data is never sold, and we're gathering our first group of members now.

This started as a personal experiment: how many barriers can you put in front of bots on a social site before running them stops being worth it? It has since grown into a full forum, with a game along for the ride.

The Bot Problem

I believe the spread of bots on social media is wearing down the faith we have in each other, as well as posing a real threat to democracy. Any post on a contentious topic draws artificial traffic like flies to garbage. It exhausts the people willing to discuss things in good faith, and floods the algorithm with manufactured opposition or consent, depending on which side of the aisle you find yourself on. Online communities become insulated echo chambers, and the political divide keeps growing.

I don't claim to have a solution. To this day there's no catch-all fix for bots, and defences that used to hold up can become obsolete in weeks at the rate today's automated tools are evolving. Nevertheless, I've put a number of obstacles in their way:

- An invite chain. The first 1,000 members join with a founder pearl; after that, every new account needs an invite from someone already inside. Every account remembers who invited it, so a suspicious account can be traced back to its inviter, and if needed the whole branch of the invite tree can be pruned. The best defence is never letting bad actors in at all, but for now that review is done by a human, case by case, based on reports from other members.

- Cloudflare Turnstile at sign-up. It often turns away autonomous agents, not because they can't get past it, but because it trips the built-in safeguards of many cutting-edge models.

- Behaviour signals while you post: pasted text, unnaturally fast or even typing, a hidden trap field only bots fill in, and rapid-fire posting. These add up to a risk score from 0 to 5. Only the score is kept, never what you typed. At 5, posting pauses until you solve a captcha.

In all honesty, these are still fairly crude measures, and I plan to keep updating them as agents get more capable. There's no guarantee of a bot-free space. The hope is to create enough friction that running bots here costs more in tokens, time or money than it's worth.

What We Hope to Offer

Anyone can start a thread on any topic, under a short set of rules that prohibit hate speech, slurs and cursing. The topic I think gains the most from a bot-hostile space is politics: in my experience it has the most vested interests trying to steer public discourse, and the most to gain from good-faith discussion. We currently host U.S. and Canadian politics threads with built-in trackers: polling averages that update live, plus seat maps. If you'd like a thread like that for another country, just ask. As long as the data is publicly available, I'm happy to build it.

The Game

There's also a built-in browser game, The Pond. To be perfectly honest, it's completely antithetical to the serious tone of the mission above. You start as a sardine, grow into bigger creatures, take on giant bosses, and meet other members live to team up on missions or duel. Also, it's fun. It works on phones, and you can jump in as a guest without an account. The thinking is simple: an empty forum offers no value by itself, but a game does, and players will naturally explore the rest of the site. I hope.

What I Want From You

Feedback, feedback, feedback. Critique the features, suggest changes, tell me what you liked and what you didn't. This is still very much a hobby project, and I want to get out of my bubble and hear what holds up to public scrutiny and what doesn't.

turingsgate.com (the game opens straight away at turingsgate.com/pond)