You sound irritated that people find Recaptcha irritating.

It's not about disliking anti-spam measures, it's about highlighting the woeful method that is re-captcha.

"Select all squares with street signs" shows a bunch of squares, some of them contain only part of the pole that presumably has a sign attached out of shot. So do you click that square that only has the pole? A pole is not a sign, it's a piece of steel. But it's part of the sign, so are people expected to select it or not?

Re-captcha is not a smart system.

Not to mention, you're basically providing free mechanical turk style work for google. Back when it started with digitizing books, alright sure thats helping an open initiative to do something good. When I have to click cars and trees and traffic lights in order to post a comment, Google, is having me do work for them, and I'd rather not work for them, even if its only a few seconds at a time here or there.

> A pole is not a sign

Guess we can close the file on that one.

I don't see reCAPTCHA use being limited to this sort of case at all.

On the contrary, many websites use it as an initial gate before I get to see anything.