For the love god, PLEASE STOP with the CAPTCHA.

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Damn! it started for me exactly after the Cornflake's warning for the Zimmerman thread and the mail exchange I had with him.... and I was convinced it was some kind of passive-aggressive revenge!! !!

Now I feel like a nasty minded person

It got me twice today for no apparent reason.

Cornflake, I'm curious, is admin access here different from mod access? in that case, I didn't know you were such a heavyweight

This seems to be an issue with Cloudflare then. Has someone attempted to communicate with them? This captcha issue is a recent one, and they might know what has changed since then, perhaps there have been more spammers lately or they have changed something in the system somewhere. Who handles the WP-Cloudflare relationship, Alex? sliqua?

@ Shatbat (had to remove your quote because CloudFlare blocked this post!! !)

Both me and Cornflake have admin rights in addition to mod rights. I means we have a larger toolbox of actions we can take - provided CloudFlare doesn't get in the way and stop us from doing our work as has been happening recently. Only Alex has access to the CloudFlare settings; though I think Sliqua the site's hosting company has access too - but aren't supposed to change anything without permission from Alex himself. Getting Alex to do anything is always an uphill struggle and he often takes several days or several weeks to respond to anything from us. Sometimes he ignores the site and any problems here for several months at a time.

He is supposed to be working on a new version of the site software, but I've heard that said for several years and so far nada, zilch. I doubt it will ever happen. So the site is likely to continue limping on until sooner or later something maybe hits the fan and the site crumbles completely. Using CloudFlare was a last ditch attempt to get the site to handle the heavy load and to repel spammers; but it isn't without its penalties or problems.

The admins here (myself and TallyMan) have access to additional tools which allow us a "deeper" access to site functionality than a moderator would ordinarily have.
It appears to have been a recent adjustment to the way CAPTCHA works that has kicked off its recent somewhat hyperactive challenges and clearly, it needs pulling back, just a little...
The owner of the site hosting WP is aware of the current problem but he is not responsible for making decisions on what or how services are facilitated on WP itself; only Alex can decide on those and he has of course been informed about the problems.

Ah, I see TallyMan has responded while I've been endlessly fiddling with this response.
Basically that - we will have to wait until Alex addresses this issue.

i like them (captchas). they add flavor to my life. they are like a mini puzzle that i have to solve before i can post what i want to say.
i had a thought that maybe the captcha routine may also prevent very drunk people from posting here
if one can not reproduce the erratically printed words in the captcha dialogue box, then they are either drunk or dyslexic, or neurally atypical, or they may even have dementia.

so to catch a drunk, a net is cast that dooms many innocent posters.

but i know it is an effort to head the "spambots" off at the pass.
sometimes i must return to my dirty old posts and throw in a justifying edification

I'd like to point out that with this captcha business, before it was implemented, the implementor should have become thouroughly familiarised with the control of said software, and set it up accordingly.

Since cloudflare is the controller of the software in question, this could be the result of a coding change in the software itself that has caused this to happen on, more than likely, a multitude of sites that use cloudflare. There's ultimately nothing WP can do to change that, regardless of how well the system is known by those who have them on their sites.

It's a bit like a windows update for a computer that you own, that update could cause problems for every user, but the user's familiarity with the complexities of windows won't help them solve the problem, it's ultimately up to the distributor to correct the problem with a change in the coding to correct the malfunction.

Ultimately, whatever change was made, likely was not supposed to cause this kind of malfunction in the captcha system. More than likely it was reset to include more aggressive spambots that have been able to penetrate the system and bypass the captcha in some way. This of course, is only speculation because I didn't write it, however it seems to be the most logical explanation.

Granted yes, CloudFlare is the controller of the software, and as such captcha is a service provided by CloudFlare, but I find it odd to think that CloudFlare does not provide end user, (IE Site admins who use their service) access to taylor the services provided to WP administrators.

If there are no admin privileges for users of their service, then I find the decision to use their service as-is to be profoundly poor. --it's essentially tantamount to subcontracting a third party to moderate the content of this, and presumably any other site that utilise their services.

CAPTCHA here has left me alone most of the time, but I just got hit with it twice yesterday and again this morning... not nearly as bad as for some of you, it sounds like.

I have a browser add-on that actively blocks the CloudFlare domain, and I am using it on all my computers specifically *because* of CloudFlare and for no other reason. This is because CloudFlare was causing the loading of WP itself to stall out / hang for minutes on end whenever I would first open the page. I knew it was CloudFlare because eventually I would get a message that scripts running from that domain were not responding, and giving me an option to terminate them, which I always would, to get things moving again. After a while, it got so old that I installed the add-on just so I wouldn't have to keep waiting for CloudFlare every time I came here.

OK, so at least Alex has been contacted about this. Cornflake and Tallyman, have you asked him to give you guys access to the CloudFlare settings? If you already have admin access to the forum it's not much of a stretch to allow you access to those, too.

I second this, unless it's already been tried. I have to wonder just how effective that CAPTCHA page is in stopping spambots. If it can be bypassed by modifying the text of the post (sometimes in seemingly random ways!) it would only stop the really dumb ones. Perhaps that covers most of them, I don't know, but I'd like to see it tested. This might be a case of the cure being worse than the disease!

That's interesting. What is the name of the add-on? Do you have a link for it?

It's the NoScript mod for Firefox; I guess I should say it doesn't actually *target* CloudFlare, it just blocks everything until you tell it to allow something through. So I've been telling it to allow everything I trust but never CloudFlare.

Some sites won't allow you to surf them if you have a mod like that, but it's not a malicious mod and I'm not a malicious user. So I don't mind telling you about it.

[edit] Here's the link:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... /noscript/

^ I already have NoScript and let it block CloudFlare by default anyway. This doesn't seem to block it from sticking its oar in though - if it isn't allowed it still brings up the CloudFlare captcha window but hides the text needed for the Catpcha. Haven't you had any of these annoying captcha requests?

I have, but although I can see that CloudFlare is still not allowed in my copy of NoScript currently, CloudFlare still can throw a CAPTCHA at me as you say, but it does show me the CAPTCHA text, so I've never had a problem passing CAPTCHA caused by NoScript. Fascinating!

I hope the CAPTCHA events don't continue to multiply, but meanwhile, as long as NoScript stops the scripting timeout error and lets me browse here without wasting so much time waiting, it's doing its job and keeping me happy.