ThreadViewCaptcha has evolved significantly from a primarily CAPTCHA-based protection system into a broader anti-bot and AI-scraper protection layer.
Recent updates strengthen crawler verification by combining IP-range and ASN checks, reverse-DNS validation, stricter session binding, and explicit allow/deny logic for known search, social, and AI crawlers. A matching User-Agent alone is no longer enough to gain access, which greatly reduces the risk of simple crawler impersonation.
The add-on now distinguishes more carefully between legitimate search and user-facing crawlers and AI training bots, while protected RSS/XML endpoints are handled more safely. CAPTCHA handling has also been hardened with fail-closed behavior, tighter IP and User-Agent binding, and improved noindex handling for challenge and error pages.
Additional work has focused on reliability and scalability, including safer bot-range updates, automatic cleanup of stale verification candidates, improved dashboard statistics, reduced database writes, more efficient background DNS verification, and better handling of crawler activity at higher request volumes.
