getting in ยท post 02 of 7 in this channel
The WeTheNorth captcha is the first thing you meet
Paste an address, wait, and the first thing on your screen is not the market. It is a puzzle, and it is usually an ugly one.
the three wethenorth market addresses
hn2paw7zfvndw3dovycegeqmvvnf4pl67b3g2p7pohjlzavloosh73id.onionhn2paw7zrgujyhnt6mgxlt2q6uhgbke4itpqitxhyfbumq3wtnckbuyd.onionhn2paw7zadwkcra3qzv5e4q547i7e5lvxm62cfxqftuqdu7moiu2ceyd.onionprinted the way they were handed over. no labels, no numbering, nothing here says which one to try first. this feed never opens them, so it has no status light, no percentage and no date of checking to give you.
what it is actually for
It is not there to check that you are a nice person. It is there because an onion service is cheap to hammer with automated requests, and a puzzle in front of the door makes hammering expensive.
Everything about how it behaves follows from that. It is not optimised for your comfort, because your comfort was never the goal.
A market that dropped it would be easier to use and easier to knock over, and the second of those decides the question.
why it looks so bad
The distorted characters, the odd colours, the letters that lean into each other. All of that is there to make the puzzle hard for a program that is reading the image.
Modern commercial captchas offload the work to fingerprinting and behavioural signals, so they can look clean. That approach needs to know a great deal about you, which is not available here and would not be welcome if it were.
So it goes back to the old ugly method, which asks nothing about who you are.
it will repeat, and that is normal
Getting it wrong once, twice, three times is common. The images are genuinely hard, and a wrong answer usually just produces a new one.
It repeating is not a judgement about you, and it is not a sign that the address is wrong. It is a puzzle you got wrong, in the mundane way that puzzles get got wrong.
If you have been at it a while, slow down rather than speed up. Most repeated failures come from rushing the second attempt after the first one stung.
the version with a trap in it
Some markets use an entry puzzle that asks for something a captcha has no business asking for. A username. A password. A phrase you would only give to the market itself.
A puzzle proving you are human does not need to know who the human is. If a captcha screen asks you to sign in first, you are not looking at a captcha, you are looking at a form collecting a login.
That is the one thing on this screen genuinely worth being alert about, and it is worth more attention than the letters.
after it
A solved captcha gets you to the front page, which is covered in the post on what the front page shows. It does not get you into an account and it does not prove anything about where you are.
It is a turnstile. Turnstiles have opinions about traffic, not about people.
Which is worth remembering if you got through on the fourth attempt and felt vaguely tested. Nothing on the other side knows how many goes it took you, and nothing about the puzzle was ever about you specifically.
replies
a reader askedI keep failing the captcha. Is the address wrong?
the answerFailing a puzzle tells you nothing about the address. A wrong address does not produce a captcha you can fail, it produces nothing at all.
a reader askedCan I skip it?
the answerNo, and a page offering to skip it for you is offering something the market did not build. Take that offer seriously as a signal about the page you are on.
a reader askedDoes the captcha know who I am?
the answerThis kind does not. That is the trade the ugly old style is making: it works without a profile of you, which is why it looks like something from a much older internet.
what this post is not Not a way to solve a specific puzzle. There are no answers here and no tool that reads the image for you.