Investigate FriendlyCaptcha support
Release notes
Problem to solve
Provide an alternative to reCaptcha on GitLab. reCaptcha is a pretty terrible experience for a lot of people (namely; Firefox users, VPN users, people with disabilities, anyone outside the USA) but is an unfortunate necessity when dealing with spam.
Intended users
User experience goal
Provide an alternative captcha system for those who would like one, with alternative methodology used to help prevent spam but provide a better experience for users.
Proposal
Investigate possibility of implementing https://friendlycaptcha.com, which was suggested by its author on Hacker News.
Further details
Some good examples of why a reCaptcha alternative would be good:
- reCaptcha is predominantly based on US imagery, which makes visual identification difficult sometimes for non-US citizens
- reCaptcha barely works in Firefox. They seem to have an odd delay built in which causes the images to load very slowly
- reCaptcha is not great for accessibility
- There are arguments against the use of reCaptcha on the basis of its use providing free image recognition training for Google
FriendlyCaptcha looks to have some interesting benefits, most notably that it's open source and can be self-hosted. We could potentially provide support for both the SAAS version and the self-hosted one, which would be a good option for our own open source communities.
Permissions and Security
Documentation
Availability & Testing
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
Support for an additional captcha solution and perhaps a streamlined way of adding other alternatives in future.