Hi Pierre and others, thank you for your replies. Thomas Bächler:
By reading manpages (readily available on the internet), an online sha256 calculator and some brain function, you can easily solve this without a Linux computer.
I know I could have solved it, as could have every other Arch user. All I'm saying is that while I understand the necessity of a good captcha, I found this one to be over the top. It's that kind of humor that I can't appreciate after hours of fiddling around with a broken system. I wanted to register for a forum, not find out where to best calculate SHA sums. Pierre Schmitz:
I implemented this "captcha" some years ago as we had massive spam and troll problems. We are not just fighting spam bots but actual humans here. [...]
Ok, I didn't imagine you actually had severe troll problems, and I understand that not many trolls would go ahead and try to solve *this* captcha. In that respect I totally understand why it has to be so "difficult". I don't have a suggestion right now but I thank you for being open about it and I hope you all can understand my frustration. Thanks :) FE