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Comment by tinycommit | Hacker News Reader

Eww. Ok, so, I’ve used reCAPTCHA on sites I maintain at work, just on forms to prevent excessive bot spam submissions. No way do I want to subject users to this BS, though. Does anyone have recommendations for other decent captchas that could be used instead?

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I run into https://www.hcaptcha.com/ and https://friendlycaptcha.com/ from time to time as a user without complaint. Can't speak to the latter but I've used the former a bit and it does the job.

Any chance for something 100% self-hostable? hcaptcha and friendlycaptcha last I checked require interfacing with their services.

hCaptcha is horrible. I think that a PoW captcha would be effective to make spammers just mine Monero instead.

Cloudflare Turnstile, if you're already using Cloudflare (or not!): https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/tur...

Bots are usually very stupid and will bail on any captcha system they don't recognize, so anything you make that's custom and requires javascript will cull 99% of them. This may change at some point with LLMs but for now my websites at least are still holding strong.

Anubis is an alternative to captchas, it's OSS.

hcaptcha is pretty popular these days. It uses a very wide variety of traditional visual puzzles.

in my good ol' days I just sent a screenshot to 2captcha for grid of the entire captcha iframe which means that the solvers would have to figure out what to do instead of having to write code for each different type of captcha. to solve their new rotating puzzles I would just capture them at 50% opacity twice and change the prompt to pick the highest brightness object since 50% opacity would dim the moving elements.

hCaptcha is horrible. I think that a PoW captcha would be effective to make spammers just mine Monero instead.

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