[olyjohn]

How does a human abuse a website, and how does a CAPTCHA stop a human from abusing a website when it's designed to let a human in? If it doesn't stop humans from abusing the site, then it must stop... computers from abusing the site. And it stops computers by using the CAPTCHA to tell apart a human and a computer? Am I wrong here?

[chrismorgan]

I can tell you don’t live in a network Cloudflare hates.

[olyjohn]

I get hit with them all the time. That doesn't answer how does a human abuse a website? Hitting F5 on the keyboard 1000 times?

[chrismorgan]

Abuse isn’t just about inducing CPU or network traffic load (in fact I doubt that was even considered when CAPTCHA was first invented). It’s spam, fraud, that kind of thing. A lot of it is bot-perpetrated, but quite a bit is by humans too.