is there a captcha...sometimes?

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I just made a post and I got a captcha. First, "are you human"? Then I had to identify aeroplanes. Twice. Then it gave me a 400 (bad gateway or something) error. I went back and made the post again and there was no captcha.

Is this normal behavior or is it a sign of something nefarious?

It happens from time to time, particularly if you're making a lengthy post, the website is just dated and things break periodically for no obvious reason.

For me it happens *ALL* the time, when it does pop up.
But it is easy to overcome the error message.
Just hit the previous page function on the browser a couple of times and you pretty much almost never loose what you have written.

I think it has something to do with what browser is being used.
I use Foxnews Firefox, btw.

No, it's part of the protection offered by CloudFlare. See https://www.cloudflare.com/ and click on "Solutions".
Beware - it's immediately technical in nature.

As stated above - if you've apparently lost a post on seeing the "bad gateway" message, just click on your browser's "back" button a few times and you should end up back at the post editing screen with your content intact.

That said, for lengthy or detailed posts it's worth copy/pasting the content to an external plain text editor - Notepad under Windows, say, and saving that file.
Click anywhere inside your post and do right-click/select all (or Ctl-A), then right-click/copy (or Ctl-C), click anywhere in your post to de-select everything - then in the external editor do right-click/paste (or Ctl-V) and save the file (Ctl-S).

It's possible to be pretty slick with this: before pasting the clipboard into the editor do Ctl-Z (or right-click/undo), which should remove the text there, then do the right-click/paste (Ctl-V), then save the file (Ctl-S).
This is a simple way of keeping the saved version in sync with the edited version.

It's a mystery what triggers these challenges - it seems to be some any/all combination of length of post, number of quotes and number of times previewed. I don't think I've ever had one for a short(-ish) post, irrespective of previewing. There were none for this post.

Nope - the error message is generated as a result of conditions external to the browser. I normally use Firefox but I've received challenges when using Google Chrome too.

Pepe is right. When you get the "bad request" message just hit that back arrow until you get to your reply window, and usually your post will be right there...intact. And you can just hit submit on it a second time. And it will go right in- no fuss no muss - and no "are you a human" message.

^ It looks like this behavior is now a thing of the past:
viewtopic.php?t=400747