So many websites now have one
I think most are trying to stop “AI” training bots scraping them, but this is a lost battle and anyway LLMs bring you traffic (if they mention the source like Claude does).
And some are trying to block DDOS attacks.
Cloudflare will be doing great business 
These are super intrusive so it’s surprising there are zero comments. I know of one tech forum which had to do it (to block large bot traffic) but I think people mostly hate it.
My beloved Polish briefing portal sometimes enters that captcha loop mode, urging me to select squares with buses over and over again (without telling me whether a van in distance also counts as a bus – we have these here servicing the less frequented routes). Of course it always happens when I urgently need to file a revised flight plan…
How do we know they don’t use you to train AI how to recognise a bus?
Peter wrote:
These are super intrusive so it’s surprising there are zero comments. I know of one tech forum which had to do it (to block large bot traffic) but I think people mostly hate it.
If it’s the kind which just shows up and then disappears without the picture “game” e.t.c. or makes you just click a square, people appear to accept the perceived necessity of it. Bots are a huge problem indeed up to the point where it gets close to a DOS attack, apparently this will stop some of them.
I’ve seen it on one large aviation website recently and even places like autoscout e.t.c. use them these days, as the bot traffic becomes unbearable. I suppose it is one attempt to drag out the inevitable, that current identity sign ups simply don’t work anymore. Basically, if you wish to keep your community “safer” the only thing which does work is 2-way authorisation for sign ins, which are required to post.
Also some bots collect data and repost them elsewhere, even tough also some sloppy reporters keep doing that. The laziness in the print business is reaching really annoying proportions and you wonder who are they trying to fool if even in competing newspaper sites you can read word for word the same article and sometimes the odd forum post snatched from forums by bots.
My favourite is “howe do you stop cyclists from accessing your website?”.
Answer: a captcha of “tick all the boxes with red traffic lights”.
@Mooney_Driver wrote:
people appear to accept the perceived necessity of it.
I think you are right – at least that’s how I feel about them. What I really hate is the constant cookie popups. It might have been a good idea in the 1990s, but today it’s just an annoyance that essentially changes nothing about how these sites can and do track you. It’s an example of well-intended legislation not adapting to the technology.
We don’t need a law that says “don’t kill someone with a stone” and another law that says “don’t kill someone with a stick”, etc.
The goal of the cookie legislation was supposedly something to do with privacy – massive fail!
Just a test… how many people get the Cloudflare captcha (the one which needs a tick) when going to ASN e.g. here ?
It may be browser version dependent. Older browsers cannot run the invisible “proof of work” script so they get the nasty tick version.
Google Chrome (newest I would think because – Google Chrome), no captcha.
Right; thanks. I also confirm no captcha with chrome on win10. But chrome on win7-64 (not a current version) does get the CF captcha every time. Incidentally my bank demands an SMS code on win7-64 chrome but not on win7-64 Supermium browser.
So there seem to be anti DDOS scripts being run all over the place now, which fail on older browsers.
I think these people are not familiar with what CF actually offers, because the CF features EuroGA uses do not present the full tick captcha to me on win7-64 either.
