I did, but the problem is that I never expected to be scraping for so long and it was always easier to just solve by hand than do a complete rewrite and allow for using CAPTCHA libraries. If I had known I would be scraping for ~3 years, I would have done many things differently: http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20archives#how-to-crawl-ma...

The whole point of CAPTCHAs is to be difficult to automate. Or are you suggesting automating farming out the CAPTCHA solutions to cheap workers?

Yes. Quick list of providers I've worked with, in no particular order:

http://www.imagetyperz.com/

http://expertdecoders.com/

http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/user/login

https://de-captcher.com/

http://bypasscaptcha.com/

There's a plenty of service providers that sell APIs to captcha solving services at reasonable prices.

Or if you don't want to spend money, you can always re-host things on your own site. Let your visitors do the work for you.

I assumed it was a joke. But maybe not?

There are plenty of services that do exactly that. They're pretty cheap.

The main problem is that most CAPTCHAs are terrible, and do a better job of keeping humans out than robots.