Good evening.

While I was able to search and read your forums in the w3m text-browser, the registration form was impossible to complete.

The issue that I am reporting has no priority and may not concern many people. However, I deem the inconvenience artificial and unnecessary. Let me explain:

A computer that I try to upgrade from a hacked, illegally installed Windows to a recent version of Debian will not let me start XOrg because of some nasty incompatibilities of the graphics chip with the monitor and my own inability to provide a matching xorg.conf file.

With w3m I could read many threads on the topic of missing screen-sections and screen-sections that were unusable, but finally decided, that I had to register an account with LinuxQuestions.org to present my own log-output and settings.

It was unfortunately impossible to see and activate the captcha-button.

So, I had to shut down the system, start my own machine, wait for the account to be validated and then retry with w3m on the defective system again.

Whatever may be the volume of evil that the captchas divert from your forum, could there not be an easy way to provide an alternative test for users of text-browsers ?
I am sure that alternatives exist.

Thank you anyway,

Michael

Interesting. I often browse this forum with e-links after a login but I had never thought about a captcha in the registration process. Here is one approach to the problem I found on the net:

http://minds.coremedia.com/2013/06/1...n-gui-systems/
"Responding to CAPTCHA Challenges on non-GUI Systems
by Moritz Kleine on June 14, 2013
When moving a service that gathers data from a 3rd party system to a hosted non-GUI system (e.g., AWS EC2) you may need to enable access to the 3rd party system from that non-GUI system by responding to a CAPTCHA challenge.

Problem
The problem is that your 3rd party service provider will recognize attempts to log into your account from a new location and may protect your account by presenting a CAPTCHA challenge.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Common challenges are images containing blurry letters which can be read by humans but cannot be extracted by todays image processing algorithms. So there is no way of scripting a response to the challenge. Human interaction is required at some point.

If the shell is all you can use, you can of course access the login page of your 3rd party system, e.g., using wget, but remember that each login request will get a new challenge and will only be granted if the response to the challenge is the right one. So youll better use a text browser but then you will still be unable to view the image that youre supposed to decipher.

Solution
Lynx can be configured to use an external image viewer by editing lynx.cfg. If you dont find lynx.cfg on your system, just create your own (or download one) and pass it to lynx using the -cfg command line option. On our system, the image viewer xv was configured:

XLOADIMAGE_COMMAND:xv s

The trick is now to replace xv with a command line tool that helps you to finally see the image. I used scp (using SSH public key authentication) to copy the image file to my local machine so that I was able to use my favorite image viewer to read the text.

You could also print the image or email it to someone who will then read the images text aloud when you call him. Anyway, once you got the image to another device, youre nearly done.

Conclusion
Lynx and scp can be combined to help you to respond to CAPTCHA challenges. The approach outlined here works for graphical challenges but can also be used for auditive challenges as long as theres any chance to download the audio file or to capture the stream."

i think the forum software ate the % again... fixed it:

Thank you for the idea.
What may have kept me from using an external application was probably the fact that w3m-img is not working on the system that I had to use for the registration, as there is no framebuffer available and there was no working X-server (still is not).

If you know of an image viewer application like the old zgv (which should not be used any more for security reasons), but which does not need the framebuffer... ah hell. I am registered now and do not have the problem any more. The procedure is however complicated and I would first think about replacing the graphical Captcha against something else. But, as I wrote above..: No Priority.