reCAPTCHA V2 Update on February 2019

On February 14th, Google released a major reCAPTCHA V2 update aimed at countering automatic solutions. Previously we published a post describing what happened with reCAPTCHA in 2018.

The last update seemed like the best-ever reCAPTCHA update that affected our service: regular users never felt a thing while automatic solutions either stopped working altogether or started working very slowly. It was a might blow to our service, we thought Google finally won and we'd have to increase the rates for captcha solutions, but then we decided to hold this off for a while and went to work.

We spent much effort on involving new workers and understanding the reasons "why it takes our workers so long to solve captchas using our software while regular browser solution is way faster, even though our software fully simulates browser actions". We aren’t completely certain we’ve understood the reasons behind all this; too many changes were made in the recaptcha__en.js file in this update, and it’s way too arcane and complicated. However, as of today we are back to our regular speed of operation and would like to keep the $2.99 per 1000 captchas rate for a while.

While we are at this, please notice that we are solving reCAPTCHA V3 and have recently added a Chinese GeeTest captcha solution.