Is there any way to configure what reCAPTCHA is actually displaying?

Posted by trejder on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by trejder
Published on 2014-06-04T09:14:54Z Indexed on 2014/06/04 9:24 UTC
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Is there any way to control, what kind of image is displayed to user in reCAPTCHA or what kind of puzzle he/she is required to solve? I noticed at least two significant changes to what reCAPTCHA is serving (and I must admit, that I don't much like these changes):

  1. For years reCAPTCHA was serving two words from scanned books and user was required to solve one of them. They were clearly readable (even those "second" ones, that could be ommitted) and with nearly no problem in solving them by a human.

  2. For past few month, I noticed a significant change at all of my sites, that are using reCAPTCHA. They started to show combination of computer-generated long numbers string and something, that looks for me as street/house number photographed in Google StreetView. They're even easier to solve, but what is most important -- it started to happen more and more often that user is obligated to solve both of them.

  3. Now, I have noticed another change/regression. Now some of my sites remain at so called "level 2" (like above) and some of them started to serve two words again ("level 1"?). And again, there are more and more situations, where solving both words is required. But, what is most important, on this "level" words are nearly impossible to solve (on my old mobile devices with 3.5'' display I need 5-6 attempts to pass on!). They're cluttered, written in some strange font, mostly in italics with a lot of black and white stains or drops on letters etc.

Plus: reCAPTCHA stopped to be equal -- some of my pages are still serving "level2" while some of them are "killing" end users with a need to solve "level3". Is there anyway, I can control this -- force it to use only "level2" and on all my pages?

(of course, I'm using exactly the same piece of code to serve reCAPTCHA on all my pages)

Note, that I'm not asking for something like in this question. I don't want to change what reCAPTCHA shows (to disable words in favor of only numbers for example). I only want to control, which "version" of puzzles (among described above) reCAPTCHA shows and I want to make it equal on all my sites.

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