Making reCAPTCHA less annoying with region-based selection
Google’s reCAPTCHA exists to prevent automated bots from accessing certain services that are only meant for humans. Over 100 million CAPTCHAs are shown every day.
However, the widely used reCAPTCHA v2 can be a massive pain to click through when you’re just trying to access websites for personal use. It’s especially frustrating on websites where verification is required for every few actions you take, forcing you to repeatedly select every single tile with a sliver of a traffic light or crosswalk.
I have been meaning to create a tool to simplify this process. The goal was simple: make proving “I’m human” less irritating.
After exploring a few options, I decided to create a chrome extension that allows you to select the region of interest on a reCAPTCHA screen and then automatically click on each of the selected tiles in that region.
Github Repo: https://github.com/naveenkul/recaptcha_clicker
Note: This tool is for personal web browsing use only.
How it works:
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Install the extension and quickly toggle the extension on and off with a hotkey (Alt + R).
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Hold down shift key and click and drag to select the region of interest on the reCAPTCHA screen.
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Release the shift key and the extension will automatically click on each of the selected tiles in that region.
3x3 tiles demo
4x4 tiles demo
What it doesn’t do:
- Fully automate the reCAPTCHA verification process to bypass it.
- Automatically adapt to future reCAPTCHA iframe changes.
Final thoughts:
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I’ve been using this extension for a couple of weeks now and it’s been a huge help.
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There’s a bit of hardcoding in the extension for some of the tile size calculations and so any changes to the element structure of the reCAPTCHA will break the extension.
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The extension is purposefully kept simple and doesn’t try to automate the entire reCAPTCHA verification process.
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Pretty sure Google isn’t going to allow hosting the extension on the chrome web store, so I didn’t bother trying to get it approved.
Bonus
