The Google ReCaptcha system is very frustrating to use. This is always letting me use it a bit, then preventing me from using a website, due to automated traffic, even though I am using the captcha properly. Why does this happen? That is why I like using Ubuntu 18. It has an anonymizing TCP application that prevents this from happening, but I wonder what data ReCaptcha is sending when I finish it. Why does it take time to finish after I click the submit on the captcha? What is it doing? There are automated tools to complete a captcha for you, it is very good too, it can complete image and sound challenges. https://github.com/dessant/buster. This is a highly recommended addon for Firefox. There must be other ways to verify a human. Bots want to fill in certain form fields. If they are provided, but are not required and hidden, then this could help, as the bots will fill them in and humans cannot, now without advanced Firefox plugins to view hidden fields. But on a blog site, Akismet is a very good way to prevent spam, and it is automated. There must be a good way to filter out bots on many websites without requiring a ReCaptcha that just wastes time and effort clicking 1000 boxes with fuzzy grainy images of cars or bicycles.
Why are we putting up with this in 2019? Why have computer programmers not come up with a better option to tackle spam and bots on the Internet? If you are using WordPress for your website, and are accepting comments, give this a try, Anti Spam: https://wordpress.org/plugins/anti-spam/. This uses invisible elements to trick spammers, this works very well indeed. Couple it with Akismet and your website will be well protected from spammers. If your website is unprotected, then it can be overwhelmed in no time, I know that from experience, and it makes your site look cheap if it is full of unwanted spam about medications and insurance deals. There is a example of forum spam here. This is not a good look on your forums. I am sure there are forum software plugins that are very effective at stopping spam and will help protect a website. I have seen forums with 100 pages of posts that are all spam. Possible thousands of them. How to you even get rid of it? It would be out of control. That is why a site would need good developers to integrate a home-grown solution.
This website: https://www.stopforumspam.com/. Is offering a plugin that uses a spammer blacklist to stop forum spam. Just install a plugin and the spam will be significantly reduced. Akismet has protected my site from 554,769 spam comments already. That goes to show what a great solution it is to prevent your website filling up with spam. Writing your own forum software is another solution, if the forum software is not well known, it will be targeted less, as there are Google Dorks to find software installations like PHPBB and other examples of forum software. This would allow the integration of a nice anti-spam solution that would be most effective against malicious and annoying spam.