Recently someone has taken to using 5000+ IPs to bypass rate-limits and try many passwords. Therefore, it is now required to solve a captcha when logging in. JavaScript is required for this. I know that several forum users like to use NoScript, but I am not aware of any high-quality (ie. not OCR-able) captcha services/libraries which don't require JavaScript. You can maybe enable JS just for the login page, and then disable it again afterward.
There are a few people who use automated bots which need to login. Contact me with a description of your bot, and if it seems reasonable, I will give you a key which will allow you to bypass the captcha.
Let me know if you see any bugs.
I was wondering why there was a change.
This captcha is irritating (sometimes you have to click on multiple screens), but it does seem to be necessary. You wouldn't want to take risks given the number of hackings there have been.