Captchas are the absolute spawn of the devil. Every time I see one on a website, I want to punch the face of the person who invented them, until my fists hurt. Unless I really NEED to use that site, I just go elsewhere, once I get a Captcha shoved in my face.
Max Levchin (the lesser-known co-founder of PayPal) invented CAPTCHAs. So you can pretty easily get a picture of his face to print onto a pillow to punch.
ReCaptcha v1 was quite a reasonable compromise until the spammers caught on and Google turned it into the annoying AI training and user tracking service it is now.
OK. Off the top of my head, some reasons I loathe Captchas:
1: You're working to train for free to train $megacorp's image recognition or OCR algorithms.
2: Even after [what seems like] eleventy billion Captchas and eleventy billion people pointing it out to them, they STILL don't tell you how to do the damned things properly. ie. If you ask me to click on any image with traffic lights, am I supposed to only click the lights?.. or the posts as well?.. what about a square that only has a wee part of one in? Does that count, or not?
3: As above with text based Captchas. Is it case sensitive? Do I have to include spaces between the words? What about the punctuation? Or the fragment of the previous or following word, peeping in at the side?
4: The Captchas never make allowances for the end user's language settings, so I'll often get American terms used, where the thing I'm meant to be identifying isn't called the same in real English. So I'm not 100% sure what I'm looking for.
5: If you have an ad-blocker, you'll usually be asked to solve about three Captchas in a row, thus cubing the annoyance.
Thank god for 'Buster' is all I'm going to say!
[I'm not going to link to it because the less people know about it the longer it'll keep working].
There are third-world sweatshops that solve capchas for a fraction of a penny. I imagine they provide an API, so your bot makes an http call and gets a solution back.
