Like several other users, I tried creating a new account since I couldn’t get into my own earlier today (and resetting the password didn’t help, as others have noted). I wasn’t even able to create a new account.
The problem? Those CAPTCHAs were seriously utterly illegible. I went through about ten of them and couldn’t make out what any of them said. I could make out several of the letters in each one, but not all of them (in particular, the white letters on the black background).
I see, of course, that other users were able to create their new alternate accounts. Did you find it really hard to read those CAPTCHAs? Did you have to run through several of them to find one you could read? Even then, was it hard?
That long thread about the new advertising series mentions many times that the board presumably wants to encourage new users to join. (The point in that thread was that ads were driving newbies away.) What about hard-to-read CAPTCHA’s? Are those also probably discouraging new users from signing up?