I meant ... that I just tried to join. Filled in the form and had to complete the Captcha. Got it right - I'm certain - 5 or 6 times - but it kept telling me that I failed the Capcha verification test.
I didn't read the comments first, spent about ten minutes on it. From a cursory glance, I think it comes down to the following lines:
In modal.register.js:100, 128, 337
$("#veriImg").attr("src", "/present/captchaImage.action?t=" + new Date().getTime());
It doesn't seem like the expected value of the captcha ever actually gets registered on the server side.
My one idea of stopping before the Ajax request and setting the verification code equal to an empty string to try to match a null/undefined on the server side didn't work.
It's possible that, in some really obvious error, the server makes its own request based on a current timestamp to get the captcha value to match against and uses a later timestamp, but the time difference because of latency means that I can't test that without guessing a bunch of times.
From that I would assume that they think they have enough coders, and don't need any more. After all, if you've got over 400,000 subjects, the top 10% are going to be pretty good, especially if they keep competing for the same prizes.