Comment by ethin

The problem is what is the alternative? I'm (not) defending them or this practice by any measure, but we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system. I've hated CAPTCHAs ever since I first encountered them and I can't wait for them to just finally die a permanent death, but I also don't know how we solve the "how do you identify a human and a bot" in a way which doesn't require server admins to have extremely beefy servers or similar setups to handle the extra load. I'm not going to do the "there HAS to be a way thing" either because, for all I know, this could just be one of those impossible-to-solve problems.