If you or someone you know has tried to sign up recently for The Sandlot, you may also know that there was a problem that prevented one from being able to complete the registration. We were using Google's "reCAPTCHA" (a backronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") interface to prove that the person signing up was not a robot. This is to prevent robots, or automated software, from being able to create hundreds or thousands of registrations and flood the forums with spam. Google discontinued their "v1" of the software, which caused this portion of the registration to fail. I have updated it to use their new "v2" which is a lot "smarter" and should only require you to check a checkbox saying you aren't a robot when registering. Sometimes it may show a series of pictures and ask you to select ones that match a given criteria, like people or signs or cars. I apologize for anyone who has attempted to register for The Sandlot recently and was unable to complete their registration because of this error. If anyone has problems with the new registration, please post in the "Get Help!" forum. Thank you.
There were studies that showed that the failure rates for humans doing the captcha (not recaptcha) was higher than the rate for robots. Ultimately the captcha made it easier for robots than it did for humans.
Honestly, you wouldn't believe how many times I failed the captcha. *Choses the audio test* "You will only get one try with the audio. Listen carefully, and then type the word below. Asfentighys." Me: