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Comment by tomduncalf | Hacker News Reader

Google Captcha is a complete mess at this point and I often leave websites that use it if it's not essential to what I am doing

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I don't log in to Google Captcha sites anymore, unless I absolutely have to.

Their discrimination against FF users has been fairly evident over the past year or so.

It's amazing how my identification abilities improve exponentially by using Chrome instead of Firefox.

Reading these types of comments on HN, you'd think HN doesn't use Recaptcha for login/register. ;)

Easy to hate on Recaptcha while reaping the rewards of participating in a community that deals with less automated spam because of it. :)

Really? I use a VPN most of the time and have not once had a captcha for logging into Hacker News.

I signed up years ago, and never have to login really, and have never see a captcha on HN. Not saying it doesn't exist, but I've had myriad captcha issues on other sites, but never once here.

> HN doesn't use Recaptcha for login/register

I just created a new account to check; not even so much as a Recaptcha url in the page source.

Hi there!

Even more annoying are those sites that insist on using it, even though they know I'm human -- for reasons like I've paid them some money or jumped through their KYC hoops. At that point it's just being rude and exploitive, and, personally, I've reached the point where I'll simply take my business elsewhere if a site chooses to treat me with so little basic respect.

There's a case for preventing bot action even if the bot is willing to pay. Though putting a captcha right after a payment step is borderline fraud.

What's KYC?

"Know your customer"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer

Oh you mean like Mongodb Atlas? (Although looks like they've gotten rid of it or toned it down). There were days where I couldn't log in because recaptcha just refused to let me.

I will cancel services that use it too. I am not wasting 5 literal minutes to solve impossible captchas because I don't use Chrome.

My power company (the sole government-run provider in my area) now has reCAPTCHA on their payment form.

Which was my point from my earlier downvoted comment. The idea that training Google AI is a condition of use is ridiculous. You have to provide free labor to Google as a condition of paying your electric bill. You also have to share your data with Google — even if you decide not to complete the Captcha.

The newest version is going to be invisible - i.e. it just "works" without a questionnaire. It's based on a scoring system that doesn't prompt users unless the website owner wants to prompt them below a specific score. You've likely already used it but don't remember it because it was invisible.

That was supposed to be what this version was (reCaptcha v3). As a matter of fact, however, quite a few of us get extremely long or unsolvable captchas every time.

No, the OP is showing v2. v3 doesn't have any UI for end-users: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/v3 It is simply a scoring system, applying an ML model to typical actions for your website.

It's up to the site owner to determine how to handle those that don't meet v3's score, which can be a traditional CAPTCHA or hopefully something more effective and forgiving to humans: https://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/

I was assuming that most people were using v3, my browser was flunking the scoring test, and v2 with the UI was being shown as a backup. Did everyone decide not to use v3 for some reason?

v3 is the newest version that came out only recently, and requires changes to the front end implementation. You have probably used it but because it didn't prompt you, you don't remember it (i.e. survivor bias).

I see - I assumed your top level comment was talking about something after v3, since that's already out. It would be interesting to see which sites have already implemented it. Maybe there's a userscript or something that can detect it in the page?

Personally I'm skeptical it will ever work correctly for me without tinkering, because I block third party requests (especially to Google) by default.

Same... so frustrating. If it's Google's goal to create frustration for non-Chrome users that would be evil :'(

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