Chapter 3 of 6 / I cannot get in
The captcha never passes
You have typed it correctly four times and the site has disagreed four times. Almost always this has nothing to do with the characters, and the fourth failure was caused by the first three.
What it usually turns out to be
| Cause | How often | What settles it |
|---|---|---|
| A dropped or dying circuit | Very common | Rebuild the circuit. This fixes most of them |
| A rate limit you triggered by retrying | Common | Stop for an hour. It is indistinguishable from refusal |
| The far side being overloaded | Common | Try later or use another address |
| A drifted clock | Occasional, and invisible | Sync the time and try again |
| Actually misreading it | Rare after two attempts | Slow down once, then move on to the rest of this list |
The loop, and why it feeds itself
Every refusal looks the same, so you assume the last thing you changed was wrong and you try again immediately. That is the exact behaviour a rate limiter is designed to catch, so around the fourth attempt you are being refused for retrying rather than for anything about the answer. From your side nothing has changed, which is what makes it so frustrating.
What to do, in order
- Check the address once, because a form that refuses correct input is also what a copy looks like after taking it.
- Build a new circuit and reload the page. Not the captcha, the page.
- Check your system clock. A surprising share of these are a machine a few minutes out.
- Try a different address from the set.
- Then leave it for an hour. Waiting is the fix more often than any of the above.
Why this page attracts the wrong kind of help
This screen is the single best place to find people in trouble, which is why an offer of help tends to arrive shortly after somebody posts about it in public. There is no support channel outside the market, so anything that reaches you here is not what it says it is.
Why it cannot just tell you
Because a more helpful error would also be helpful to whatever is flooding the door, and the far side cannot tell you apart from it. That is the same reason the whole chapter looks the way it does. A hidden service has no identity to work with, only behaviour, so its answers are blunt on purpose.
Why the answer is never in the image
By the third attempt the characters are almost certainly being read correctly, and continuing to stare at them is the least productive part of this. The failure is happening after the answer leaves your browser, in a layer that has no opinion about the letters at all, and no amount of care with the image touches it.
That is worth saying because the natural instinct is to assume the last thing you did wrong is the thing to do better. Here the last thing you did wrong was probably the previous attempt.