The HOA is the owners. The owners vote in some board members who do the work on behalf of the majority of owners.
Sometimes the HOA hires some 3rd party management company to handle stuff, but in our case we felt it was wasted money because we would care more about the results. In the end I can see why a lot of owner boards do that as the day-to-day of running the place is obnoxious.
The public spaces were on our property, so our responsibility.
There is a Russian captcha solver bot called xevil that costs under $100 (I think, last time I looked) that has been able to solve nearly all captchas for years. You just have to supply it with relatively expensive proxy IP addresses because Google rate limits solve attempts.
So the title of this article has been true for a long long time. Capatchas are absolutely useless except against poor or uninformed script kiddies.