You can pay a human to solve it but you can't make a human solve it in a fraction of a second so reCAPTCHAS still do what they are design to do which is to impose limits.

CAPTHAS are here to stay even if they are effective only a fraction of the time. That is why I said I don't mind it as long as it is done right. GOG didn't do it right or I would not be asked before and after #5 and since I rather like GOG I hope they get it fixed soon (which they won't).

Came on the forums just to complain lol
I just did a few, even a few "Sorry try again" ones, for the newletter discount. I'm questioning if I want to stay on the mailing list if discounts aren't going to work.
Getting pretty sick of the entire internet becoming CAPTCHAd in some way.

and for what it's worth, hCAPTCHA is way easier than Google's.

It's funny how Google is one of the most invasive things ever to happen to the internet and nobody bats an eye. It's like Steam. Just look at the number of people using Chrome. And google search is used by 86% of users. Pretty much nothing happens on the internet without Google sticking its damn nose into it.

Complaining is what a forum is all about! lol

And hCAPTCHA does not hide the fact the they are using us to train their AIs.

Google is convenient and most people don't mind giving away their data as long it is convenient and they don't have to pay a dime. Hell, our whole society is built on convenience.

And just so you know the reigning champion in data collection is not Google or Facebook but Microsoft. And Microsoft logs everything.
Have you tried to clear your Google activity? It takes a few clicks.
Have you tried to clear your Microsoft activity? You have to manually delete every single entry. They don't give you the option to delete in bulk. I had to write a script to trigger the click event in the entries to avoid wasting hours doing it manually.

I don't know how well informed this is, but I took the advice to slow down my clicks and it may have helped (hard to say with confidence).

I forgot to mention that I daily-drive Firefox ESR and some sites don't like it. For those I use chromium-ungoogled.

For searching I use Startpage which is very privacy focused. And NextDNS+NoScript+uBlock+PrivacyBadger takes care of the rest.
The argument about trying to prevent farms is quite interesting!
I'll put it to the test next time.

EDIT:

Tested it on no-ip.com host confirmation and it makes no difference to me. When I check the box I get and image puzzle and no matter how fast or slow I solve it the verification passes without issue. The only time I had to solve a second puzzle was when I solved the first puzzle quickly but waited a few seconds before clicking Verify.

This reinforces my believe that GOG's implementation is broken.

Even if you are right - the damage to real humans is a lot bigger than the damage to bots. So I dont see your point. Bots dont care if they have to wait for a human to solve the captcha, humans however are slowed down - which serves no good purpose that I can think of.

A bot--or worse, a bot-net--can hit a web service endpoint many, many times per second which might lead to DoS and other service failures. CAPTCHA Wikipedia page indicates that "It takes the average person approximately 10 seconds to solve a typical CAPTCHA" and even trained people will not be able to solve multiple catchas in less than a second. That means putting the endpoint behind one will throttle down the amount of requests it has to process by several orders of magnitude.
If you leave aside the posibility of DoS and failures, handling requests has a cost that scales quickly with the number of requests. It is cheaper for GOG to pay a ton of money to Google for reCAPTCHA than to leave the endpoits unprotected and that alone should give you an idea about the value of the CAPTCHA services.

yeah , if you dont buy captcsa google will ddos your site , we know how defense money works

If the point of captcha is to make users wait then they could just make them wait instead of harassing them. And considering that logged-in users get a captcha for one single request this make-them-wait argument doesnt make any sense at all for the GOG case here.
And this explains why logged-in users with huge library and lots activity and recent sales need to be harassed for one single attempt at redeeming a code?
Of course captcha may have 'value' for GOG. This 'value' however ignores the human cost on the other side. If you look at this from a point considering both sides it obviously has negative net value. And rephrasing this: If GOG would instead give user the option to pay 0.01$ to avoid captcha hassle it would be a win-win - both sides would have a better deal. Or rephrasing this: captcha use is bad for everybody other than the one (Google here) selling it.

It's called protection money, as in protection racket, literally. lol

Personally, I don't like the reCaptcha system at all.

I've had to deal with a messed up one for Hulu login for almost a month before they got it fixed in Feb. 2021. To make matters worse, the agents always tell you this is normal, even though as a user YOU know what YOU experienced before the issues started.

I truly wish GOG did not use this system. I can only guess there must have been some serious issues to the redeem system for GOG to even implement this system.

I hope they have a better system in place, cause the reCaptcha system always makes feel as if the system is snooping my login. I know that doesn't sound rational, but that's what it makes me feel regardless.

[Side note: I'm wondering if this is in some way related to the posts back in Dec/Jan of people saying they no longer had access to their main accounts...hmm. Probably not, but it is curious]
.

oh right, i knew it just when i pressed send :P

Who invented the nightmarish captcha? Is him under arrest warrant by the Interpol or the FBI? If not, he should.

Did you sing for the "FCK RECRAPTCHA!" Gentlemen's Club? ;-)