Cannot sign up in stan forum nor send posts. "There has been a problem with hCaptcha, if this problem persists please contact a system administrator"

[wencong002]

Summary:

Cannot sign up in stan forum. "There has been a problem with hCaptcha, if this problem persists please contact a system administrator"

Description:

I know that I should pose questions at stan forum. When I want to sign up at stan forum, it always indicates "There has been a problem with hCaptcha, if this problem persists please contact a system administrator". I am Chinese user and use VPN to view the overseas sites. Does this lead to the hCaptcha problem? How to solve it? Thanks in advance!

Reproducible Steps:

Please report steps to reproduce the issue. If it's not possible to reproduce, please include a description of how you discovered the issue.

If you have a reproducible example, please include it.

Current Output:

If applicable, any relevant output from RStan.

Expected Output:

If applicable, the output you expected from RStan.

RStan Version:

The version of RStan you are running (e.g., from packageVersion("rstan"))

R Version:

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Operating System:

Your operating system (e.g., OS X 10.11.3)

[bob-carpenter]

Thanks for reporting, @wencong002, and sorry this isn't working for you.

I am Chinese user and use VPN to view the overseas sites. Does this lead to the hCaptcha problem? How to solve it? Thanks in advance!

VPNs can be a problem for Captcha if your VPN is flagged as suspicious, or you don't have a stable IP address, and presumably other things. I'm not a security expert or even amateur. I don't know if we can get around this. I'm pinging @martinmodrak, who I think is largely maintaining the forums these days, and if not, he'll know who is.

The only solution I see if this is a persistent problem across VPN servers and browsers is to keep asking questions on the GitHub issue trackers. The main drawback to that is not as many people see the questions, so they're less likely to get answered.

[martinmodrak]

It appears Discourse automatically enabled the hCaptcha plugin on all hosted instances in November 2024. However by default, the plugin is not fully configured, so that may have caused an issue. I have now disabled the plugin (as it couldn't have been doing anything reasonable in current state).

@wencong002 could you try again?

A note to self is that if we see an uptick in spam, we probably should create a hCaptcha account for Stan and integrate it.

[martinmodrak]

Update: turns out the change was not by Discourse, but by another admin. So we need to be a bit more careful about this.

Once again thanks for reporting!

[wencong002]

Thanks for your enthusiastic replies. Really appreciate your support. I have already signed up in stan forum. Thank you!