Currently if you use a development or testing environment, there's no way to disable the CAPTCHA validation for that particular environment without some serious hooking.
What we need is a global variable that can be overridden in settings.php for different environments that disable CAPTCHA as a whole so that we can run automated tests that bypass captcha alltogether.
A good example of this is running end-to-end user signup tests without having to manually enter a CAPTCHA code on a testing environment.
Needs work
1.0
Code
A documentation change is requested elsewhere. For Drupal core (and possibly other projects), once the change has been committed, this status should be recorded in a change record node.
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It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.
None of the patches above apply.
There should be a captcha.settings for just a globally enabled flag. This could then be overridden via local settings file.
I've updated the schema, default settings, SettingsForm and captcha_form_alter to add this setting - see provided patch.
Once the patch is applied you can add $config['captcha.settings']['captcha_enabled'] = FALSE; to your local settings file to override the config.