If other security is being increased, might it be possible to remove the insulting "recaptcha" physical ability test? I know my eyesight and hearing are imperfect and I do not need to be called inhuman!

@mjr, oh you've picked a minefield!

I'm not sure whether this site actually uses Recaptcha (i.e. Google's offering) or another flavour of Captcha. If it is Recaptcha, I'm pretty sure it's v2 and not the new less visibly intrusive v3, but for me that's a good thing. There have recently been some discussions about Recaptcha v3 and the feeling its data gathering could likely be seen as excessive and therefore in breach of GDPR legislation in many scenarios. I'm very protective of my privacy, so I'd personally hate this site moving towards something like that.

Nonetheless, whether Google or not, I accept some form of Captcha is pretty much essential. It doesn't improve security; it simply avoids bots setting up (nice and secure) accounts and then spamming us senseless. What I would argue, however, is that a much simpler form of Captcha could well be used with very little loss of effectiveness against bots.

Just my two penn'orth....

Good points above. I'm not going to be dropping Recaptcha quite yet because there are so many bot/spoof accounts that try to be created for any number of reasons and Recaptcha does a relatively good job of filtering those out.

As an aside, I got a bit too clever for my own good last night and my original posts are now all "anonymous" 🤣 Will get around to fixing that when I get a moment. 

@majordennisbloodnok It's recaptcha. Which isn't a captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) because it fails to tell computers and humans apart: it insults people with sight and hearing problems as "robots" (only slightly better than its previous habit of saying they were not human!) while there are now computer programs that can pass it more reliably than many humans. v2 may be better than v3 but it still harvests user data.

I agree that a captcha is useful, possibly even essential, but recaptcha is a gross insult mixed with ableism and data gathering.

@mjr so if you’re basically saying Google is the spawn of Satan to be avoided in favour of almost anything else, I agree. 

The first of our badges is out and we've settled on this one for experts (people with strong knowledge backgrounds) on the forums. 

On the back of the expert badge, we've now added a Premium Member badge – this is a paid member upgrade that will help support the forums with a portion of the proceeds donated to Stripe Climate, an initiative that helps to scale emerging carbon removal technologies in the fight against climate change. 

All the details about the Premium Member can be found here: https://renewableheatinghub.co.uk/premium-member

How about a range of “covering the bases” badges for people able to give user experiences of combining renewable technologies?

The obvious combination is solar pv and ASHP, and there are plenty of us available, but the experience of those members who’ve incorporated wind and solar together, who’ve built their own energy storage solutions and who’ve saved or generated energy in innovative ways are particularly valuable voices to celebrate.

@editor

Hi Mars,

If you are responsible for these pop-up adverts that keep appearing on the screen, then I am far from impressed. Also, some days I have to go through the login process several times, which again is becoming most annoying.

@derek-m, I’d tweaked some Google ad settings this morning and they appear to be responsible for the new ad formats. I’ve now disabled them and reverted back to to the old settings. According to Google it may take a few hours for things to revert back to how they were.

As for the logins, is that because the site is not remembering you?

@editor I don't know about derek-m, but the site doesn't remember me for very long, whether or not I tick the "Remember Me" box on the login page. Maybe a day or two max. That means that I cannot participate again until I get one of those evil eye tests that I can pass. There's not much point even reading the site because it won't remember what I've read if I'm not logged in. I'm sorry to say it, but isn't it a bit ableist?

So what we need @mjr is a 'virtual robot app' on your PC which detects the recaptcha pop-up, moves the pointer to the box and mimics left-click on the mouse...

That surely can't be very difficult to implement, can it? 😎 

Good news guys. Recaptcha has been removed for registered users 😀 

I googled the being logged out thing and it appears to be a cookie related matter pertaining to browsers. I don’t get logged out very often at all. I’ll continue to do some reading and if there’s a fix we’ll implement it. 

Posted by: @transparent

So what we need @mjr is a 'virtual robot app' on your PC which detects the recaptcha pop-up, moves the pointer to the box and mimics left-click on the mouse...

That surely can't be very difficult to implement, can it? 😎 

I could of course program such a robot because I do for my work, to extract data from websites whose developers didn't bother to give their users an "export" function, but I very rarely get away with just one click. I think Google can probably tell that I'm using accessibility tools to compensate for my eyesight and privacy settings to keep their nose out of my browser, so it punishes me with the full eye test almost every time. Of course, if I was unethical, I could just pay one of those captcha-solving farms that hire low-pay workers or one that gets fools using dodgy web sites to solve them for you, but that would still leave all other audiovisually-impaired users stuck.

Posted by: @editor

Good news guys. Recaptcha has been removed for registered users 😀 

Yippee! Hopefully there's some way for people still shut out to contact you to register.