CAPTCHA Fails First Attempt When Replying—No Option to Refresh Challenge or Retry

When Replying to a Question, on numerous occasions the CAPTCHA failed validation with the following message: "The characters you entered did not match the word verification". I checked, double checked, tried adding spaces before and spaces after and the error message persists on each try.

Invariably this happens on the first try. And, because there is no feature for requesting a new CAPTCHA challenge my only recourse has been to copy/paste the content of my reply and then reload the page and start over. Also, invariably, the second try succeeds.

I captured screen shots of two such episodes, attached below.

[Then, ironically, on my first attempt to post this Bug Report, it happened again, as can be seen in "Screen Shot 3" below.]

FYI: this was on Firefox 31.0/Win 7 64-bit Home Premium SP1

That's interesting, because it would explain some of the really weird quirkiness of this site. I'm a web developer, too, and have designed my own CAPTCHAs and getting them to work properly was a no-brainer -- and they do backend validation using AJAX.

Also, the "dumping reply content on Submit" problem -- again, don't see why that's such a problem, unless there's, maybe, some sort of validation issue -- but, still, not that hard to achieve [or resolve], for someone that knows what they're doing. So, the intentional sabotage theory seems plausible.

Also, there's the "click on a link in a comment replaces the page" issue. That is _very_ simple to resolve: just add *target="_blank"* as an attribute to the anchor statement.