IS24: user agent spoofing vs captcha issues?

[myhd]

Hi there,

First off, I just want to say I appreciate the great work that went into this project.

I’ve been working to get it running and even spent a bit of money on a captcha service provider to help things along.

It’s been a mixed experience overall (IS24 captcha broken!?), which made me stumble across something that might be of interest.

While testing, I accidentally discovered that captchas don’t seem to be displayed if a test script (not flathunter) pretends to be the well-known speech bubble chat app with a green color scheme. The mechanism is quite simple. I found this quite surprising!

My question is:

Could it be a potential solution for flathunter to spoof user agent strings to avoid captchas altogether, or would that be out of the question (e.g. for ethical reasons)?

Also, would this approach be considered less ethical than using captchas, or are both solutions on a similar ethical level?

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this!

Best regards, J