Developer Evangelist at GitLab here. Sorry that you had a hard time debugging the failure. I had gotten these reCaptcha questions myself recently. In the past months, there were numerous spam waves with flooding the issue tracker. You can see that with the increasingly high issue number, as their IDs have been burnt.
I agree that reCaptcha is not the best solution. We have an ongoing discussion which also includes replacing reCaptcha with hCaptcha. While I cannot make a promise, I recommend that you subscribe to the issue. Also, please add your thoughts in there too :)
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/21998#note_325...
Next to having captchas, there are other spam prevention ideas. One of them would be to follow a trust level model such as Discourse, but that needs more long-term planning and a fair model to let existing users becoming trusted.
Please see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/14156#note_258... for more details.
Cheers, Michael
I initially chose Gitorious when I needed to share an open source project because it was free software. I've been transfered to Gitlab.com and was ok with this back then.
But requiring me to run this piece of non free tracking malware and solve a captcha to manage my free software project, and worse, making me force this upon the contributors of my projects? This is bullshit.
I know the Gitlab staff is on HN, so thank you for your amazing software and for the free hosting, but be aware that this is making me move as soon as possible and actively discourage people from using Gitlab.com. ReCAPTCHA is not OK. Never.
Cloudflare made the move [1]. Will you?
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch...