Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by gberger | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

gberger·

Why do I have to complete a captcha to access this website?

View on HN

You don't. Just close the site! I was curious but not that curious...

(edit: it's archived: http://archive.is/H9EYE )

They even dare to tell you to turn off ad blocking to get through the Cloudflare captcha. So much for "making the internet faster"...

In addition, I find the new hCaptcha used by Cloudflare much worse than reCAPTCHA. It's slower, with ambiguous inputs demanding more mental effort, and sometimes it just refuses my correct answers.

Google probably has a good enough handle on you to serve the easy captchas. But keep in mind that for users they can't fingerprint (e.g. with Tor Browser), reCAPTCHA is usually insanely hard or even blocked ("Your computer or network may be sending automated queries"). hCaptcha has been heavenly compared to that.

'Hard' is not quite the right word for it. reCAPTCHA frequently rejects objectively correct responses when they fail to fingerprint you.

I've seen some sites suggest they CAPTCHAs will go away if I disable my ad blocker[†], so if not everyone is getting it this could be a factor. Before I bother even clicking to see if I get the CAPTCHA, is the content worth the effort?

[†] I can see how this replaces ad revenue at all, so I assume it is an attempt to make running an ad blocker seem like an inconvenience rather than a benefit.

I still got the captcha even though I'm running no adblocker

Sorry, firewall thing -- dependent on recent (geo-ip) threats. Nothing to do with ads -- no ads.

Turn it off.

What threat to you are bots viewing your website?

Same here, today I figured out I'm not human...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com