[Toolserver-l] CAPTCHA can be required for logins from toolserver hosts

[Carl (CBM)]

At the moment, logins to enwiki from nightshade.toolserver.org are
throwing up a CAPTCHA. This is easy to check by loading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:UserLogin in w3m or another
browser from that host.  Logins from willow.toolserver.org do not
require a CAPTCHA at the moment.

The CAPTCHA requirement makes it impossible for bots to log in via the
API. The fundamental problem is that bots are run automatically, of
course. But the API also does not report the CAPTCHA requirement at
all, so bot developers are given a "WrongPass" error that they have to
investigate to find that a CAPTCHA is the problem.

This CAPTCHA situation has happened before, most likely due to some
erroneous bot on toolserver triggering it. But individual bot
operators cannot fix it, and so to them it has the same effect as a
toolserver outage.  Moreover, whatever bot operator caused it probably
has no way to know it was them.

It seems like this may take collaboration between toolserver and
wikimedia to fix, but probably the fix will involve at least some
change on the wikimedia side. So I have filed a bug at
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23982 to coordinate
discussion there.

- Carl