THIS FUCKING RECAPTCHA GEM! WHY THE FUCK MUST I DEBUG YOUR FUCKING PRODUCTION CODE AND WORK AROUND YOUR FUCKING BLUNDERS?

VERY LITTLE PISSES ME OFF MORE THAN SUFFERING FROM SOMEONE ELSE'S FUCKING STUPIDITY

Mini CAPTCHA rant incoming.

CAPTCHAs are a big misunderstanding. They tend to fool people more than robots nowadays (not hyperbole) and are ironically self-defeating:

The more widespread a challenge is, the more likely it is to be beat, and the more doors it opens at once.

It's really not all that difficult to design your own challenges if you are really worried about spam bots. The fact that your challenge is unique is usually the best deterrent to spam: not only do spammers need to write a unique program to solve them, but it only unlocks spam on one website (yours!), so why bother.

Google just profits off your data, discriminates on YOUR behalf based on your clients browser, pulls in a ton of obfuscated Google code, and degrades user experience without really deterring spam.

@AlgoRythm I definitely agree with your mini-rant.

I once spent at least five minutes solving one of those stupid image-recognition captchas, where you have to pick out traffic lights or crosswalks or whatever. It kept replacing the images with new ones.

I'm fully convinced that a computer probably could have solved it before I did.

@AlgoRythm I completely agree, and wouldn't implement it except for my corporate overlords. 🙄 I've been trying to convince them to replace it with hCaptcha with little progress, despite it being both a drop-in replacement and better in every way. Hell, it would even pay us. I simply do not understand.

@Root HCaptcha is an absolute pain in the ass to solve though.

@PrivateGER Yeah, it's definitely harder.
Worth it to avoid feeding data to google, though.