Can we get rid of the CAPTCHA?

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It's so *******annoying. It makes me want to scream!! ! Especially when it keeps insisting you use it and it doesn't even work.

Seconded. it was supposedly switched off a year or two ago, in response to our complaints, and it did go away for a while, but clearly it's not off these days. It seems to affect my posts when I have more than one quote in them. I find that breaking them up into smaller posts gets them through. Gets tedious though. It's so ridiculous. I've been a member here for years and the software thinks I need to prove I'm not a robot.

OMG!! I know, right? After seven years, I am still being asked if I am a robot.

There must be something better than CAPTCHA. I tend to generate long post and sometimes they take 30 minutes to create. I submit the post and take a break. Then I come back and there is CAPTHA. Not only that but it has timed out, so now I am into the phase of looking at low resolution photographs to see if I can detect a bridge or crosswalk or bicyclist. Then it seems like the link was posted, but it wasn't. And not only that but my thread was lost. So I have to reenter it from scratch. It almost makes one want to scream!! !! !! !!

Ironically, I've heard it targets longstanding members more than new ones. I'm afraid this forum is being hosted on the cheap, and we're suffering the consequences.

Yes that's the other rub - It seems to attack when I've typed a lot, taken a long time about it, and included multiple quotes, in other words at exactly the point when I'm likely to have done a lot of work. It couldn't be more annoying if it had been deliberately programmed that way.

One wise precaution is to copy any such post to the clipboard before hitting the Submit button. If you forget to do that and the capcha comes up, be sure to hit the back button, and with a little luck your work will still be there. In my experience, once you attempt to solve the capcha, some or all of your post will likely be removed whether or not you solve it.

I guess I'm lucky - I know of another website that uses the same crapcha thing after I've been browsing there for a while, with the one small problem that it fails to even display the puzzle in my browser. Luckily it's not the kind of website that I'd want to post anything on, so I don't lose any work, and the solution is to simply abandon it for a while and go back when it's simmered down.

People deserve to be rewarded for their hard work---not to have something on their back, to make the work even harder.

CAPTCHA or the ability for a bot to spam the site relentlessly

You can all f**k off if you think I'll delete threads all day long

Just 30 minutes. I sometimes take 1 to 2 hours to write a long post, but then delete it as it is too long!

It's true what Ferris is saying.

In the old days, these Indian voodoo type "love potion" sites kept on infiltrating WP. The Mods had to delete these threads.

Oh dear! Why did they want to do that?

CAPTCHA is a necessary evil to combat the spam bots.

I always copy a post to clipboard before posting, and if it is a sufficiently long post, sometimes I write it out in Word first.

it's just spam

not this type though

You can "save draft" while you're writing. I also highlight / copy my longer messages so I can paste them onto a new page if they get eaten. Usually back-page will do the trick to salvage whatever seems to be lost, though.

Depends what you mean by "necessary." Myself, I don't see why it's necessary to have an algorithm that doesn't even work - I've seen spam happening on Crapcha's watch, and I've seen Crapcha ruin spam-free material that innocent users have tried to post, wasting their time and effort for no good reason that I can think of. Even if Crapcha was the best free anti-spambot solution in the world, I would question the need to switch it on without at least warning users and advising them of the best precautions and apologising for inflicting it on us. Crapcha's destructive behaviour has been known for years, so has the frustration that it causes, yet it's been reinstated without AFAIK anybody lifting a finger to explain or to give us any support in dealing with it, apart from the occasional user-created thread such as this one. There are better ways of alerting users to the pitfalls, and it's not rocket science, but they aren't being used.