oh great the bots just removed the dots. I mean it's less invasive now (no links a cursor could access, so yeah)
Fun myth I read on reddit a few months back: Forgot which european-based forum did this, but they had this system where they required people (at least/most those with submissions that vaguely look spammy-ish) to solve captchas, and those that looked most like spam, or are prone/known to resubmit spam have to solve consecutive captchas. one mentioned up to 80 in a row.