With this news post, we want to give you insight into the events that happened three years ago and are now known as the start of the mosparo project.

The two days

The first event occurred on the 20th of April, 2021, on a park bench between two villages in Switzerland. It was late afternoon, and the sun was setting in the background. We, Marc and Matthias, discussed different project ideas. One of these ideas was a very rough one for building a new CAPTCHA solution.

One day later, on the 21st of April, 2021, Matthias (zepich) wrote the concept for a project called “NoSpam”. Later that day, we discussed the concept in a phone call. On the same evening, the first domain was bought, and the project started to take shape.

Some more days later, the name “mosparo” was defined and the project was officially started.

The concept

The concept was written on the 21st of April 2021 and did not receive any adjustment since then. After settling on the name, we did not even update the project name in the concept. The concept describes the essential features and how the verification should generally work.

Of course, mosparo received many more features than we had in our minds three years ago. However, comparing the concept with the final software is interesting because we wrote the concept before we started to develop it and described the technical validation and verification process exactly how we developed it and how it’s still in the software today.

You can read the original concept here: Konzept Project NoSpam (PDF, 97 KB)
The concept is only available in German.

The rest is history

A half year after these two days in April 2021, mosparo was installed on the first website on the internet. It’s our test website for catching spam. Another year later, in August 2022, mosparo’s private beta started with more websites. And finally, another half year later, mosparo was officially released as a public beta.

Thank you for using and supporting mosparo!

If you want to help make mosparo better, you can find all information about contributions on our Contribution page. If you find an issue, please report it as an Issue on GitHub. Please let us know in the GitHub discussions if you have any questions or suggestions. We look forward to hearing from you!