CAPTCHAs usually sort traffic correctly based on IP, browser footprint, and mouse movement before the images even load. The reason why it asks you to classify images or read text is because it knows you are a human, so your output is trusted to train models. Granted, AI/ML research has advanced explosively in the past few years, so that may no longer be the case.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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Modern Captcha or other detection systems like Cloudflare Turnstile will run a bunch of tests in the background of your browser, and try and figure out if your browser is likely a bot. Only after those fail do they bother with the image puzzle shite.
Or at least that's how its advertised. I don't know what value there is to highlighting busses or bikes or whatever now, but it does at least serve to slow down traffic if the servers you're gatekeeping are under heavy load, I guess.
Sometimes captchas are also just in place to dissuade usage in general or from some people.
Just don’t use sites which captchas unless you are paid to, I won’t train deathbots. Although i classify fire hydrants as grass when I have to
Thanks Cloudflare that's most of the internet when you are on the right VPN.
if you don't have anubis by now, you don't get my attention 
Not sure which is worse. Anubis is so easy for crawlers to pass by either behaving more or behaving less like a web browser. But I gotta wait and burn battery.
My favorite example is a site that possibly has the torrent file I'm looking for. Every single time I want a file - I have to enter a captcha. When I enter the captcha and there's no file - I feel like a very stupid seal who - again - did a trick on demand but then didn't get the treat of a fish.
I'm specifically pissed off at Google because I'll google shit in an incognito tab because I don't want an endless search history of random fucking bullshit but they've decided that my desktop MUST do a captcha almost every single time and it frequently just decides to go into "turbo fuck you" mode and FAIL ME even when the captcha IS DONE CORRECTLY, over and over again. this should be criminal harassment
Unironically this is what got me to switch all my devices to use DuckDuckGo as default, Google wanted me to solve a captcha every time I searched for something through VPN.
If you use duckduckgo with "g!" at the end, it'll search google through ddg. I mostly use DDR, but I do that when I don't get the result that I want, and Google hasn't made me do a captcha.
semi off topic but i have no idea who still uses 4chan anymore with all their captcha bs. i haven't posted there in years, and admittedly it's not because i haven't tried, but because some time in the past few years they added so many captchas with long ass timeouts (imagine waiting like 5 minutes to post) that usually end denying access and making you start all over again even if you do it right. the only way to get around this is to give them your email address, and you can't even use a burner because they only accept ones from a handful of approved domains.
i have no idea who still uses 4chan anymore with all their captcha bs.
Nazis, bots and 
mostly
This is actually a good idea to stop bot traffic. Do bots have a bank account?