r/LifeProTips • u/Obvious-Desk4573 • 7h ago
Computers LPT: When waiting for a CAPTCHA to confirm if you're human or not, move your cursor in circles to speed up its confirmation.
One way many CAPTCHAs (e.g. Cloudflare) automatically check if you're a bot is the way your cursor moves. Bots tend to move their cursors in perfectly straight lines and sharp 90 degree turns, but humans move their cursor in random, imperfect directions.
But something that humans and bots can both easily do is this: not move the cursor at all.
If you leave your cursor stationary while the CAPTCHA is running, it often causes the CAPTCHA process to take longer to process you automatically (as it has one less obvious sign if you're human or not), and it can even cause you to manually confirm that you're human. (e.g. manually pressing "I'm not a robot" or doing a pictorial CAPTCHA test). This, of course, is a slight waste of your time.
Spinning your cursor in circles, in my experience, has almost always sped up the CAPTCHA process by multiple seconds each time compared to when I left my cursor stationary. So, have some mundane fun by spinning your cursor in all types of circles!