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Google captcha causes website accessibility issues from within China #9753

Closed leoniscsem closed 1 year ago

leoniscsem commented 3 years ago

When trying to download whitepapers or other documents published on the websites, the Google captcha does not show due to internet access restrictions imposed by the Chinese governments. This might not be a critical bug for average users, but it certainly affects enterprise users, as using a VPN or proxy is uncomfortable.

Suggestion: Change to another captcha framework, for examaple hCaptcha works fine.

Reported from: https://ubuntu.com/

nottrobin commented 3 years ago

That's very interesting, and hcaptcha looks quite good.

I'm curious though - is there a specific reason why Google gets blocked and hcaptcha doesn't? Can we be confident that hcaptcha might not get similarly blocked in the future leading to exactly the same problem?

@anthonydillon shared an article a while ago about how it's actually pretty easy and makes a fair bit of sense to write your own bot busting checks. Which might be worth exploring if we want to avoid entirely the possibility of the great firewall breaking our forms.

anthonydillon commented 3 years ago

It looks like there is a proposed replacement for hcaptcha in the future but I am not convinced our sites need this level of protection.

I would like to explore some simplified solutions and cn.ubuntu.com would be a good place to test these.

leoniscsem commented 3 years ago

I'm curious though - is there a specific reason why Google gets blocked and hcaptcha doesn't? Can we be confident that hcaptcha might not get similarly blocked in the future leading to exactly the same problem?

Everything that calls Google services or APIs is blocked here. I do not think that hCaptcha or similar services would be banned, as there are no services attached which cause political issues. It is not about reCaptcha per se, it is just about politcy decisions by the government here to block everything related to Google. hCaptcha is just one of several services that work fine here.

anthonydillon commented 3 years ago

Blocked on these changes to land: https://github.com/canonical-web-and-design/ubuntu.com/pull/9590

carkod commented 1 year ago

@nottrobin Does this still apply? We are not using captcha anymore https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu.com/pull/10622