On the 17th April 2008, this was as quoted on Rapidshare News.

As every free user should have noticed, we are experimenting once again with the CAPTCHA system. The reason is that RapidShare is popular enough for people to create tools to download from RapidShare as a free user as if they were a premium user. This has a negative impact for our paying premium users, since they expect a fast download. On the other hand we are also experimenting with happy hours again. When our servers have enough spare bandwidth, we will make it easier for free users to download from RapidShare, knowing that this also makes it possible again to automatically download files with those tools. Right now the RapidShare Happy Hours will disable the download tickets and the captchas completely.

I think this is a quite good alternative. This morning itself I headed to rapidshare to rip some files off its server. The COOL  little cats didn’t let me pass the captcha test. :S At this time, I found the New Rapidshare Happy Hours and I Googled It.

It is good to know that at some point, we may download without having to wait and input captchas. We don’t know what the guys at Rapidshare have in reserve for us. My advice, keep posted in their News section.