Making reCAPTCHA less annoying with region-based selection
Google’s reCAPTCHA exists to prevent automated bots from accessing certain services that are only meant for humans. Over 100 million CAPTCHAs are shown every day.
However, the widely used reCAPTCHA v2 can be a massive pain to click through when you’re just trying to access websites for personal use. It’s especially frustrating on websites where verification is required for every few actions you take, forcing you to repeatedly select every single tile with a sliver of a traffic light or crosswalk.
I have been meaning to create a tool to simplify this process. The goal was simple: make proving “I’m human” less irritating.
After exploring a few options, I decided to create a chrome extension that allows you to select the region of interest on a reCAPTCHA screen and then automatically click on each of the selected tiles in that region.
There’s a bit of hardcoding in the extension for some of the tile size calculations and so any changes to the element structure of the reCAPTCHA will break the extension.
