Google Captcha Terror

[joedf]

I currently don't have access to cloudflare yet, but I envision to simply remove cloudflare or possibly move to a different CDN.

[PuzzledGreatly]

I'm in favour of the first idea but also think the second is worth trying. There's no silver lining with cloudflare, just stormy weather.

[tank]

Let me put to bed any discussion on cloud-flare. bots too register. no amount of captcha prevents all of them. captcha is just a roadblock. What cloud-flare does specifically for us amongst other things is analyze meta data from traffic to identify and block similar metadata to bad actors. it captures and halts excessive traffic from what appears to be DDOS. this is the purpose of ANY WAF(Web Application Firewall). Sometimes as drugwash suggested innocents gets scooped up in the process. It is regrettable and unfortunately the only way we can operate on a tight budget and volunteer administration. I wish a perfect system existed but without a professional team intervening or a super expensive robust system like what google uses, "it is what it is". This is the best solution that matches our resources at the moment.

[PuzzledGreatly]

So, if I understand correctly the reason for using Cloudflare is to act as a WAF to prevent DDOS and spamming? Are there any alternatives? I know Cloudflare is preventing people from seeing the site because I've experienced this on different computers in two different countries. Perhaps a difference WAF might be better?

[tank]

not better AND in our budget

[nnnik]

Would an increase in budget ( e.g. via donations ) help with that? How much would we need to really make a difference?

[just me]

How many visitors are actually affected by this issue? I'd expect they would report here.

[Drugwash]

We may never know how many. It's kind of a catch 22.
• Some (like me) may be blocking Google and all its (sub)domains so they may never see the challenge, they would think the site is down or whatever and they leave. A couple subsequent failed attempts and they never return.
• Some may get irritated by the dodgy captcha images and repeated requests and abort before reaching the site.
• Some may not be sufficiently proficient in the English language so they may not understand what that captcha wants from them and maybe after a few failures they abort too, never to return.
• Some may have a (very) slow/bad connection resulting in captcha images not (completely) loading, leading to the impossibility of solving it or at least a substantial loss of time for subsequent attempts, thus discouraging them from accessing the site.
• Some may be visually impaired or completely blind so they'd be unable to solve the captcha and thus reach the site. Before someone laughs at the statement I'll say that years ago there were a couple blind people at the Miranda IM forums that required certain changes in the code to accomodate their handicap. One of them even offered coding solutions for some of the problems. I'd imagine such people being even more in the need for certain automation on their computers than the rest of us and AHK would benefit them greatly… if they could reach the site.

The above are all assumptions, of course, but since any people in those situations would not be able to let us know, we would keep thinking everything's fine and dandy, while it may not be so. Just saying…

[joedf]

One side of me doesn't want money to be involved with AHK but I feel that a donation link should always be out there. I have a donation link that is hidden in the foundation docs, and believe or not some still go and find it to donate because they are so pleased with AHK and its community.

[PuzzledGreatly]

I'd gladly donate to avoid the current situation. I can now only get to the site by running my browser with all the extensions disabled. As of this morning running my browser normally results in a never ending cycle of captchas. Why has this gotten so much worse in the last couple of weeks? The captcha process itself is now as slow as treacle. I used to visit this site every day but am at the point of giving up completely.

[joedf]

Hmmm, do you have a Google account?

[tidbit]

Pretty sure nothing changed on our end. it has to be with your pc/country/browser/something.
I tried:
* maxthon and ie
* adblock+ on/off
* deleted all 4 cookies (which there really isn't that many of them, you were combining ahkscript+autohotkey.com, can't add 2 sites together for a cookie count) (3 are phpbb 1 is cloudflare).
* completely logged out
* started from the homepage (NOT the forum, but: https://autohotkey.com/ )
... and saw no cloudflare/captcha/robot/anti-spam stuff on the homepage or the forum.

I'm from, and living in USA.

what website do you use to come here? ahkscript.org? autohotkey.com? one of the other reserved names (if we still have them)?

[PuzzledGreatly]

This is weird. No changes made since yesterday and I arrived at the site without seeing the captcha at https://autohotkey.com/docs/AutoHotkey.htm. I count five autohotkey.com cookies. Three phpbb ones and then there's

_cfduid expires 13 February 2018 09:27:34
cf_clearance expires 12 March 2017 16:33:55

Are the http://www.ahkscript.org cookies redundant now? I have a YouTube account does that count as a Google account. I've seen the captcha from different computers in both Britain and Japan.

[tank]

Nothing has changed here it begs one wonder why your signled out.

[tank]

Looks like your operating out of Japan. When i check the threat levels for the site Japan doesn't register significantly. You will need things enabled for this site. Any JS services from google cookies.I havent checked our google threat statistics lately but it appears that might be where your triggering us. Money wont fix that. only enabling the services this site uses.

[PuzzledGreatly]

Back to the captcha. That cf_clearance cookie expired. I don't see anything else to enable for the site. I don't use google so can't see how that could trigger any threat.

[PuzzledGreatly]

Does anyone else have the cf_clearance cookie? I got it back by running in safe mode again. I've tried editing it to see if I can get it to last longer than a day.

[tank]

google does our captcha
R you by any chance using a proxy?

[PuzzledGreatly]

I'm not using a proxy. Who has the cf_clearance cookie, anyone? Drugwash said he is blogging Google but that doesn't matter because he isn't being flagged by Cloudflare. When the captcha strikes I have allowed everything but still suffer an infinite captcha loop unless I'm running in safe mode.

[tank]

then if running in safe mode prevents the problem it is clear that it is SOMETHING ON YOUR PC. I cannot guess what it is that is causing the problem