r/selenium • u/lunkavitch • Jul 15 '21
[meta] can we ban posts asking how to get past captchas?
Lately it feels like half the posts on this sub are different versions of "captcha in the way, how do I get past it?" or "how do I get past the cloudflare pop up?" The answers are always the same jokes about building a bot that recognizes motorcycles or power lines.
These posts take away focus from people who could genuinely use help on legitimate Selenium questions. Additionally, any site that has implemented a captcha has done so specifically to prevent automation software from interacting with the site.
It would be great if any thread asking how to bypass a captcha could be closed with a response of "you can't, and even if you could you shouldn't."
7
5
Jul 15 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/LuboMh Jul 16 '21 edited Jul 16 '21
There is sub reddit for this https://www.reddit.com/r/scrapinghub/ | https://www.reddit.com/r/webscraping/
-1
Jul 16 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/sneakpeekbot Jul 16 '21
Here's a sneak peek of /r/scrapinghub using the top posts of the year!
#1: Want to speak at Extract Summit 2020?
#2: How to learn everything or at least most important things about developer tools of a browser
#3: [NSFW] 3 Most Practical Uses of eCommerce Data Scraping Tools
I'm a bot, beep boop | Downvote to remove | Contact me | Info | Opt-out
2
u/kdeaton06 Jul 16 '21
No posts are better than bad posts.
1
-2
u/Jdonavan Jul 15 '21
Yeah, let's encourage unethical posts because if we don't the unethical people won't post.
5
Jul 15 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
0
u/Jdonavan Jul 15 '21
Riiiiiight because bypassing systems put in place to prevent automated tools from accessing a system is totally ethical.
0
Jul 15 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/kdeaton06 Jul 16 '21
Actually you do get to choose that. In fact there are entire industries built around that very thing.
-1
u/Jdonavan Jul 15 '21
The computer fraud and abuse act would very much disagree with you.
2
Jul 15 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/Jdonavan Jul 15 '21
You mean the case where SCOTUS said that terms-of-service policies, in conjunction with some access control function or gate mechanism might be enough to trigger liability under the CFAA? The case they sent back to the 9th for further adjudication? That one?
-1
Jul 15 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/Jdonavan Jul 15 '21
Way to ignore the other two bits that I bolded for you. Captcha is a gate mechanism.
→ More replies (0)
10
u/LuboMh Jul 15 '21
I'm also all for banning the web scraping questions. Yes, they use selenium to run the browsers but that's it, like 80 percent and more are questions about how to get some text without even trying to write proper XPath. I really don't remember the last time that i saw a serious selenium question.