Ask HN: What do you do when you get soft banned from captcha?

by chipperyman573 on 5/29/2020, 10:25:54 PM with 5 comments
I'm not sure why but I haven't been able to pass any captcha I've been served in the last 2-3 days. It just keeps giving me images to solve and eventually will say that I failed and need to start over. When I click the audio button (my normal workaround), it says that my computer is sending automated queries and that I can't be verified right now.

I'm using a regular residential IP, chrome, I'm signed into my 10+ year old google account, and haven't been doing anything nefarious. Other than adblock and decentraleyes I don't have any anti-tracking. I honestly have no idea what to do, 80% of the sites I visit won't even let me in, and I can't login to any of my accounts. Even my bank isn't letting me login to pay my bills, which is really frustrating. I had to call them to get them to send me a paper bill and ask for an extension. Luckily they were understanding (apparently I wasn't the first to call - did google change something recently?).

  • by db48x on 5/29/2020, 11:04:28 PM

    I long ago decided not to do anything that requires using recaptcha. Saves a huge amount of frustration. You can always find a different bank, although I can see that that is going to be pretty frustrating for you in the short term.

  • by edoceo on 5/29/2020, 11:04:02 PM

    Some of my users have reported similar issue to me, we use Google captcha service.

    I've also had more than the usual amount of blockage by CloudFlare when I'm visiting sites from my residential connection. The page from CF asks me to contact the site owner (how? I cant get to the site, reminds me of that old "you didn't get my email that email was down?")

  • by duxup on 5/30/2020, 12:45:33 AM

    If you try a VPN with a different browser can you pass captcha on another site?

  • by alentodorov on 5/29/2020, 10:57:44 PM

    There was an undocumented update to ReCaptcha https://2captcha.com/blog/google-search-recaptcha

  • by emayljames on 5/29/2020, 11:30:23 PM

    I remember there being an issue not long ago with the Safari browser and recaptcha. It would do as you described.