I've never seen that before here, and I've been here since about day one. I wonder if it's part of the changes Jim is making in order to fix the connection problems here. As of right now, this site is running as fast or faster than I've ever seen; pages are loading instantly. Who knows if that will last though.
The new "VERIFYING YOU ARE HUMAN" stop works very poorly using an old desktop computer (Windows 7. Someone else on here still uses XP.)
It took 37 minutes before the little box appeared to click on "I am human," THIRTY-SEVEN MINUTES!!! I was already logged in, (never log out), but it does this every time I try to post. (The same problem exists with other sites that use that verification check, such as grocery store coupon uploads.)
Maybe it should SKIP that procedure IF someone has been here for over seven years with over 10,000 posts, or some similar criteria.
That sucks. There's no fully up-to-date web browser that supports Windows 7 that I know of (let alone XP). There's no good reason why that should matter, but apparently it does.
What do you use your PC for? If you don't have any Windows-only software that you depend on, there are current versions of Linux that run well on older PCs and also support up-to-date web browsers.
The more out of date your browser gets the more problems you'll have in general, not just on websites that do the "verifying you are human" thing. Eventually many or most websites won't even render correctly because web standards are constantly evolving and browser updates are needed to keep up with the changes. I'm surprised that anyone here is using XP because the web browsers that support XP are all drastically outdated at this point. I can see why a years-out-of-date browser would work fine on this site before the "verifying you are human" thing came along, because it's a very basic site, but it would cause a lot of problems on many other sites.
Like I said, "that I know of." Those are both quite new; they didn't exist the last time I was messing with old computers. Supermium supposedly supports as far back as XP SP1 (and r3dfox supposedly has "limited compatibility" for XP), which is awesome. I may give one or both of those a try, since I have an XP machine that's all set up.
I wish it was still practical to use XP as a main OS but it isn't, at least not for me. Even with an up-to-date browser there are other problems, like its 4-GB RAM limit and the lack of XP drivers for modern hardware.
It's a way to protect against any Denial of Service attacks or other bot activity. The site has been running slow lately and it's possibly due to bots doing something nefarious. Now that Jim has fixed the problem with slow speeds I imagine it's just another layer of security added to protect the site.
It took NINE HOURS to be verified as human. I did not constantly refresh, but every time I checked it was still verifying. Is Jim feeding a vampire that wants human blood?