Human verification page not loading in China

Question

I was trying to post a question on Stackoverflow but got redirected to the Human Verification page. The problem is that the CAPTCHA never loads here in China, it just times out after 4 minutes. Probably because it comes from Google and Google servers are often blocked here (see screenshot below).

Stackoverflow in general works great here however being prevented from asking questions just because of a CAPTCHA that never loads is a bit frustrating (though obviously the only responsible here is the Chinese firewall).

Is there anything SO could do to allow users from countries like China to post questions? The CAPTCHA is such a critical part of it that it's a pity it depends on a third-party that doesn't load in some countries. Why not host the CAPTCHA on stackoverflow.com? Alternatively, why not offer an alternative for users who cannot see the CAPTCHA? Maybe an email confirmation or something similar?

Answer 1

Outside of building our own internal captcha there isn't a whole lot we can do here. We have talked about many various options none of which were very technically appealing. We will continue to listen to those affected by this and will readdress this if it becomes a large scale problem.

Answer 2

One solution is given by Minecraft users which might work here too...

Use the gooreplacer browser extension to replace www.google.com/recaptcha (blocked in China) with recaptcha.net/recaptcha (not blocked in China).

Answer 3

In my opinion it is very unlikely that users above a certain reputation level (such as the > 10k of the OP) abuse their account to post spam or do other undesired stuff on purpose.

So wouldn't it be an option to let users above a certain reputation level and from certain countries request a "permanent human" flag, given that they have confirmed to have a safe password, log out after usage on public computers, etc? In this way active and contributing users won't be bugged that much.

Answer 4

I recently posted a question asking about CAPTCHA in China on StackExchange websites. The solution appeared to be "SE doesn't have this option because it would involve necessarily rolling their own CAPTCHA, which is obviously buggy and insecure." And I agree that would be buggy and insecure, but that's not the only solution.

Websites such as Taobao and JD.com and pretty much any website in China use WeChat to verify human-ness. You need to register with WeChat using their real-name verification, which is a process pretty much everyone in China does, and is associated with your government ID or passport number. These websites display QR codes, which the user simply scans with WeChat.

WeChat provides an API for integrating such QR scans into any website. I'm working on developing a WeChat interface, and it's pretty straightforward to use and understand, even if some of the documentation is only available in Chinese (which I cannot read). There are many steps of security here for ensuring that the person scanning the QR code is a real person.

I think this is a reasonable solution to the problem of SE's CAPTCHA being disallowed in China. I feel bad for necroposting, but this post suggests that I shouldn't.

Answer 5

I had this happen using Firefox Android in desktop view with privacy settings enabled, I could see the Captcha Banner but not the checkbox.

I disabled "Request Desktop Site" and the page reloaded (blank, so I had to paste my answer in again), then I submitted my answer and the Captcha challenge was not offered.