Requests for Comment/Replace reCAPTCHA with another CAPTCHA

It's recently come to my attention that Miraheze is currently using reCAPTCHA for account creation, and is attempting to replace that reCAPTCHA with a new version of reCAPTCHA.

This is a major problem. reCAPTCHA has absolutely no place on Miraheze for several reasons:

reCAPTCHA is owned by Google, which is a massive tracking/surveillance company. The purpose of reCAPTCHA is for Google to crowdsource their work onto other people and to put trackers and other nasties onto every page that uses it. For the most part, Miraheze is free of these. All requests are in Miraheze and don't require a dependency on a third-party server. Except for reCAPTCHA, which both requires Miraheze's backend to have a dependency on an external server, and for users to be sending requests to Google servers, both breaching their privacy by keeping that data only on Miraheze but by using Miraheze, sending information to Google without their knowledge in the background. Fandom can keep those trackers and other nasties on their site, Miraheze is supposed to be free of that stuff. There's no ads, no clutter, and certainly shouldn't be any of this business.

This also breaks MediaWiki's commitment to w:unobtrusive JavaScript, which MediaWiki has a lot of information on. But as of right now, it is impossible to create an account without enabling JavaScript. This is a major problem for unobtrusive JavaScript which MediaWiki has for a reason and commits to. Being unable to do actions, especially basic actions like creating account, without enabling JavaScript is not okay. Even more damning, reCAPTCHA's JavaScript is proprietary, which requires users to run proprietary code to make an account, blatantly violating and damning Miraheze's free software commitment.

There are other, better ways to prevent spam, including many self hosted captchas, ones that do not require running proprietary JavaScript, are less of a burden or strain to fill out and stop spam better, which Miraheze can discuss and choose a new one to switch to.

Please bear in mind that this RFC seeks to remove reCAPTCHA, replacing it with another, better captcha that solves the problem above, not to just remove all captchas. All comments along the lines of "we need a captcha to prevent spam" or similar will be stricken.