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Comment by nceqs3 | Hacker News Reader

Ted, I've used namecheap for years and I love it. One thing though, when I visit namecheap while using a VPN it makes me fill out a cloudflare captcha. Any way to stop that? Considering I have already paid you money, you have my address, name, phone number, etc. it seems a bit ridiculous to ask for a captcha when visiting using a VPN.

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Captcha is likely being triggered by Cloudflare. We have heard this feedback in this past and have listened but it's always a tricky balance of fighting abuse/bots and presenting an extra step for the user.

Since we are at the topic of Cloudflare captchas, Namecheaps blog rss feed is "protected" by a captcha as well, defeating the purpose of a rss feed.

I have no clue about our blog RSS feeds to be honest but I can ask the team.

Also, as a general aside to web devs, if we need captchas, can we at least use something less obnoxious and more privacy friendly, like:

https://friendlycaptcha.com/

I put this on my signup form and have had zero spam since, and it has very little impact on user experience. The fact that it doesn't feed the google surveillance machine is a bonus.

Cloudflare no longer uses Google's ReCaptcha, it's now using HCaptcha (https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch...)

HCaptcha is not without problems, it is monetized by selling ML model training to 3rd parties, where the images and the labelling requests come from. Personally, I do not wish to be employed to train ML models of 3rd parties unknown to me. I have no idea about what model I'm helping train and what it is going to be used for. Transparency in this regard would go a long way towards making HCaptcha friendlier (I'm not going to talk about the ethics of free labor this time, though those too ought to be discussed.)

bots?

what are they doing on namecheap? buying domain names?

(if they're hitting your domain checker you can configure cloudflare to only captcha protect that page...)

I have the same problem with VPN. I get captcha on so many websites over and over it's ridiculous. Sometimes on different pages of the same domain! It used to be you only got captcha for form submissions. But somewhere along the line you started getting it for simply visiting web pages as well. Part of me wonders if I'm just getting played by these companies into labelling all their training sets for them.

Surprisingly, Cloudflare doesn't force me to complete a CAPTCHA while logging in to manage my domains with them with a third-party VPN enabled. On the other hand, Namecheap doesn't even allow me to log in using that VPN.

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