We Hate Captchas!

As part of the Year of More I’ve decided this year to do 12 projects over 12 months. I might have already cheated a bit.

I bought a website. Not something I’ve done.. ever before, but this one I liked the look of. The site is called We Hate Captchas.

A little while back I posted an ask on Hacker News “Are there any viable alternatives to reCAPTCHA?” and didn’t get much of a response outside of “There are other services”. My desire however was not to bring back the old solve-the-words thing that generally got in the way or proved completely impossible for some users with disabilities, I wanted the invisibility of Google’s reCAPTCHA but without the Google part.

Earlier today I happened across a tweet from Dalton Edwards, who’s created such a product. He’s selling up so that he can focus on other projects and was looking for a buyer.

Project for Sale: https://wehatecaptchas.com/

Sale includes ownership of all source code and the wehatecaptchas.com domain.

Please DM me if you have any questions or wish to make an offer. Thanks 😃— Dalton Edwards (@DaltonEdwards) December 27, 2019

Normally I imagine you should throw down a load of red tape for your standard website purchase but heck, I had a bit of cash knocking about and a need for a reCAPTCHAless CAPTCHAless CAPTCHA (what?). I figured the juice is worth the squeeze if I can ensure there’s an alternative to reCAPTCHA out there. Anyway short story shorter, I went and bought it.

In case anyone’s actively using it as-is I’m going to keep it online and working. In future I’ll rework some of it, change some things here and there, maybe even change domain? Admittedly the first thing I did once we’d sorted the payment/code exchange was grab nocaptcha.net. Aside from that, you keep doing you.

The site will stay up and running, if there are any changes made they’ll be done in a manner that doesn’t break anyone’s current use of the site.

Does this count as a project for The Year of More? I’m not sure yet, I guess if I give it at least a month’s worth of time throughout the year I can count it as the 13th project! Sweet!