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I was just trying to answer something on SF with answers from Unix.SE, since I was researching the same topic. I did that with an older browser from my old laptop at home.

I was presented a reCAPTCHA with lots of… well, it looked welsh, it did not have any vocals for sure, and some of the things looked mirrored. I hit reload about 40-50 times, tried to enter about half a dozen of them, but was denied.

The audio version sounds like a cross between white noise and moaning to me. Note I'm not an English native speaker, in fact it's only my third natural language I learned, and I learned it mostly read/write, so I could not understand a thing.

I tried another browser, but it just crashed upon loading the site. (Known issue with https in that one, though.)

So I copy/pasted that to my box at work via VPN, logged into it via VNC, and ran a modern Firefox 31 on that. I was, again, presented with a captcha… with nothing to enter. OK, RequestPolicy (something I don't have at home). I tell it to temporarily accept anything, and get a mere checkbox “I'm not a robot”. WTF?

Anyway, posted the answer. But I would really appreciate it if the site engineers could dig out, say, Opera 9.27 and try to use this site with that, every once in a while. And if something can be done about these absolutely indecipherable CAPTCHAs. Now assume I was blind, I could not have posted at all due to the “funny” audio part.

I understand this is not a priority, but please!

Update: screenshot added Screenshot

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18
  • 1
    Better captchas should be here.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Dec 13, 2014 at 14:52
  • 1
    And Opera 9 is not supported.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Dec 13, 2014 at 14:53
  • @MartijnPieters “This is now live network wide” on Dec 5, although it is now Dec 13, and I have been having these troubles. Hmm. Maybe that's only for the latest browsers? ☹☹☹ • @ Opera 9: Yes I know, but it still works, it's the best my system at home has, and in contrast to my normal browser (Lynx) it even does JS more or less nicely, so…
    – mirabilos
    Dec 13, 2014 at 14:55
  • You'd have to ask Google; it will indeed still fall back to the classic reCAPTCHA if it deems you still need to be tested more thoroughly.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Dec 13, 2014 at 14:56
  • @mirabilos: presumably you never were shown this checkbox?
    – Martijn Pieters
    Dec 13, 2014 at 15:17
  • @MartijnPieters correct. I was shown that in Firefox 31 (which is “uncomfortable” to use, as VNC is slow, and copy/paste between VNC (over VPN) and local does not work).
    – mirabilos
    Dec 13, 2014 at 15:19
  • 1
    This is a Google support issue then; the test works in all modern browsers that Stack Exchange supports.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Dec 13, 2014 at 15:22
  • Works for me. Are you able to access apis.google.com and www.gstatic.com?
    – Braiam
    Dec 13, 2014 at 15:23
  • @Braiam I had JavaScript enabled unconditionally and no filter. I assume they only use their new method for the latest webbrowsers as they probably use some background magic (maybe mouse pointer behaviour monitoring?) for this.
    – mirabilos
    Dec 13, 2014 at 15:24
  • What browser is that you are using in the screenshot?
    – Braiam
    Dec 13, 2014 at 15:26
  • @Braiam opera-9.27-20080331.1-static-qt.i386-en.tar.gz
    – mirabilos
    Dec 13, 2014 at 15:41
  • Err.... as Martin said above Opera 9 is not supported (and I'm almost sure Google don't support this feature in Opera 9 either). Use something more actual.
    – Braiam
    Dec 13, 2014 at 15:43
  • 1
    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about how crappy Opera 9 is and the solution would be for the SE network to use an alternate verification method, which for a handful of users that use an unsupported browser seems a bit unlikely.
    – user1228
    Dec 15, 2014 at 16:55
  • 1
    I ran into these captchas just now. I tried four in a row and had no luck. I also tried the audio captcha, and it didn't work in my broswer. Maybe it's unfortunate that this question deals with two different things: impossible captchas and opera support. Should we perhaps spin off a separate question about the impossible captchas?
    – user166105
    Dec 24, 2014 at 0:44
  • 1
    The site works with Opera just fine, except those impossible CAPTCHAs… some of the people commenting derailed that though.
    – mirabilos
    Dec 24, 2014 at 0:47

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