Why the Captchas?

Some of you linking to my Dreamwidth entries through Mastodon (to which I post links from most posts) are getting a Captcha check on all entries. Thanks to someone who reads the entries and who investigated why it was happening, we got this explanation from karelia@techhub.social:

If you are not using a VPN and you regularly get the captcha from our hosting provider (the graphical on instead of the DW-native text one), please email support@dreamwidth.org with your IP address… we are very well aware of the security and privacy reasons to use a VPN service for internet browsing, and we really wish we didn't have to put those barriers in the way of some of the VPN services people use to access the site, but the overwhelming majority of our abusive traffic comes from free VPN services. It's been getting sharply worse lately, and we've needed to take some radical steps to curtail it. I apologize profusely to those of you who are using those services legitimately for the inconvenience you've been experiencing.

Full text here: https://dw-maintenance.dreamwidth.org/90925.html

The Big Snow

The weather forecast I saw online predicted that we would get about 4 cm of snow last night.

( How About more like 40? )

I'm not sure, but I think that this is the second-largest snowfall we've had in a single storm since we moved here in 2011. There was one storm that dropped more, and it was followed by several more storms without a warm spell, so the snow accumulated quite a bit. Yes, this is still nothing compared to people in the Midwest or Northeast who get really big storms, but 40 cm of snow in one night is quite a bit by our standards.