Look, we can debate the proper and private way to do Captchas all day, but if we remove the existing implementation we will be plunged into a world of hurt.

I run tucson.social - a tiny instance with barely any users and I find myself really ticked off at other Admin’s abdication of duty when it comes to engaging with the developers.

For all the Fediverse discussion on this, where are the github issue comments? Where is our attempt to convince the devs in this.

No, seriously WHERE ARE THEY?

Oh, you think that just because an “Issue” exists to bring back Captchas is the best you can do?

NO it is not the best we can do, we need to be applying some pressure to the developers here and that requires EVERYONE to do their part.

The Devs can’t make Lemmy an awesome place for us if us admins refuse to meaningfully engage with the project and provide feedback on crucial things like this.

So are you an admin? If so, we need more comments here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200

We need to make it VERY clear that Captcha is required before v0.18’s release. Not after when we’ll all be scrambling…

EDIT: To be clear I’m talking to all instance admins, not just Beehaw’s.

UPDATE: Our voices were heard! https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200#issuecomment-1600505757

The important part was that this was a decision to re-implement the old (if imperfect) solution in time for the upcoming release. mCaptcha and better techs are indeed the better solution, but at least we won’t make ourselves more vulnerable at this critical juncture.

  • 133arc585English
    1•1 year ago

    Captchas pretty much worthless. […] You’re better off … with their captcha

    Also, can we not advocate putting more of the internet behind Cloudflare? They’re building an analytics platform that, unlike Google and the like where you can somewhat avoid tracking by blocking certain network requests, stuff served from Cloudflare directly means tracking can not be avoided. To block the tracking, you have to block access to Cloudflare. And when a huge portion of the internet, especially the top sites, are behind Cloudflare, you’re just cut off from a lot of the internet. Also putting everything behind Cloudflare is centralization, which seems counter to the goals of federated services.

    I’ll also quote myself from elsewhere:

    They also make it hard to do anything to protect your privacy: even changing your browser settings to try to be less fingerprint-able can get you stuck in a bot-detection/CAPTCHA loop when you try to access pages served by Cloudflare. To Cloudflare, you trying to blend in or be somewhat anonymous is “suspicious” and means they won’t serve you the content you’re requesting.

    • @StumblinbearEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Whether it’s Cloudflare, or google, a bespoke system, or some other third party, you are going to be tracked. It makes no difference. At least Cloudflare offers a supremely good service for essentially free. You cannot escape tracking, other than using browser extensions, so just use that.

      I’ve not been hit by Cloudflare’s bot detection as someone using brave and other tracker blocks, so I’m not concerned

      • 133arc585English
        1•1 year ago

        Whether it’s Cloudflare, or google, a bespoke system, or some other third party, you are going to be tracked. It makes no difference.

        You’re misunderstanding what’s happening, and it seems you think they’re operating the same way. With google, you can block network requests with browser plugins, disable javascript entirely, dns-blackhole google domains, etc. At the end of the day, you can still access the content being served without sending tracking data to google. With cloudflare acting as the first-party and directly serving you content, you can not block anything. It would be like if everything came through google’s servers (which, if you’ll remember, is part of the complaint about google’s push for AMP).

        You cannot escape tracking, other than using browser extensions, so just use that.

        Yeah, you definitely don’t understand how this works. The reason browser extensions work is because they can separate out specific resources and specific network requests by domain; if Cloudflare is the one serving you the content directly (as they do), you can’t do anything with a browser plugin.

        I’ve not been hit by Cloudflare’s bot detection as someone using brave and other tracker blocks, so I’m not concerned

        Nice to know that since you haven’t been affected it’s not an issue. Very solid.

        • @StumblinbearEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          I’m an engineer. I know how it works. I know it also makes no difference.

          The company I work for uses Google, Cloudflare, multiple third party advertisers, and our own internal analytics system. Every user is being tracked in some way, and it’s confirmed through our server hits. You genuinely cannot escape tracking and it is useless to try.

          Even if you do block all JavaScript tracking, you’re still hitting someone’s server and that’s being tracked. You literally are incapable of blocking this form of tracking.

          if Cloudflare is the one serving you the content directly (as they do), you can’t do anything with a browser plugin.

          Depending on your configuration, Cloudflare doesn’t have access to page content, only the url you’ve hit. The rest of their tracking, including what you’ve explicitly mentioned, is done through JavaScript shims that you can absolutely block through browser plugins.