Getting in / Pair 09 of 41
When the puzzle is broken and when the reader is
Nothing about a refused captcha tells you whose fault it was. The box empties, a fresh smear appears, and you are invited to try again with no idea what you are correcting.
The challenge itself is not working
The image never arrives, arrives as a broken icon, or comes back as the same unreadable smear every single time. Some of that sits with the site. Some of it sits with a browser configured to block whatever draws it. Either way, no answer you type can be the right one.
The challenge works and your reading of it does not
The picture is fine and the characters are genuinely in it. What fails is a nought read as a letter, a case that turns out to matter, or a space that came along with a paste. The check is doing exactly what it says on the tin.
Why both refusals arrive the same way
A captcha gives you one bit of information back. Pass or not. It will not say close, it will not say your third character was the problem, and it will not distinguish between an answer that was wrong and an answer that could never have been right. So the two halves of this pair produce the same screen, and they produce it at the same speed.
The frustrating part is that the page reloads a fresh challenge for you, which feels like progress. It is not. A new challenge from a generator that is not drawing properly is just as unanswerable as the last one, and a new challenge read by the same eyes in the same font goes the same way.
Where the captcha decision sits
Two separate things have to work. Something has to produce a challenge and send it to you, and something has to compare what you send back against what it stored. A broken puzzle is a failure in the first half. A misread one is a failure that happens on your side of the first half and only shows up in the second.
Over Tor the first half breaks more often than people expect. Browsers used for this are usually set to block scripts and sometimes media, and a captcha that leans on either will show you an empty rectangle rather than an error message. The site is not lying to you. It is drawing something your browser declined to render.
| What you look at | Leans towards the puzzle | Leans towards the reading |
|---|---|---|
| The challenge area | Blank, a broken icon, or a box with no picture in it | A picture with characters you can actually name |
| A reload of the page | The same challenge again, or none at all | A different set of characters each time |
| Other images on the site | Missing in exactly the same way | Loading as they always did |
| Your own settings | Scripts or images turned off since the last visit | Untouched since the last time this worked |
What separates a broken puzzle from a misread one
Look before you type
Reload the challenge and look at it before you type anything at all. A working generator hands you a new set of characters that you can read out loud. A broken one hands you the same thing again, or nothing, and no attempt is spent finding that out.
- Refresh the challenge using whatever the page offers for that, or reload the page itself.
- Read what comes back out loud. If you cannot say it, you cannot type it.
- Do that twice. Two identical challenges in a row is the generator, not you.
The value of that order is that looking is free and typing is not. Every submitted attempt is an event somebody is counting, and a run of them can put you behind the counter described in rate limiting against a wrong password, at which point you have two problems stacked on each other and no way to tell which one is answering you.
Which way round the error hurts
- If you treat your own misreading as a broken puzzle
- You conclude the entrance is no good and go looking for another one. That is the single most expensive move available on a day like this, and the search results are full of people waiting for exactly that decision.
- If you treat a broken puzzle as your own misreading
- You keep submitting answers to something that cannot accept them, and you spend attempts you would rather have kept. Annoying, and it can trip a limiter, but it does not move you to a door somebody else chose.
Written out like that the asymmetry is obvious, and yet the wrong reading is the natural one. A puzzle you cannot solve feels like a site that does not want you, and a site that does not want you feels like a reason to find another. It is not. Nothing here is monitored and no page on this site says any address is reachable, so a captcha you cannot pass is evidence about a captcha and nothing more.
What to do with the next attempt
- If the puzzle is broken
- Stop submitting. Look at what your browser is blocking, since that is the half you control, and otherwise come back later to the same address rather than a different one.
- If you are reading it wrong
- Slow down on the characters that share a shape, type rather than paste, and check the ends of the string for a stray space before you send it.
The characters that catch people are always the same handful, and a captcha font is drawn to make every one of them worse. If you cannot tell whether a letter is large or small, or whether a round shape is a letter or a digit, you are being asked to call a coin toss. Take a fresh challenge rather than guess at it. More of this shape of problem is filed under getting in.
Questions readers send about this pair
Why does the captcha change every time I get it wrong?
A challenge is single use. Once you have answered it, right or wrong, it is spent, so the page has to issue a new one. That is normal behaviour and tells you nothing about whether the first one was answerable.
Does a captcha that never loads mean the market is down?
No, and this site will not tell you what is or is not reachable, since it monitors nothing. An unloadable challenge is consistent with a browser setting, a generator having a bad day, and several other things that have nothing to do with the state of anything.
Is it safer to type the answer or paste it?
Type it. Pasting is where trailing spaces and invisible characters come from, and a captcha field is short enough that typing costs you nothing.