Question: Some days ago, the spam protection was turned up a notch.

Unfortunately, it overshot the target by far. Now, as soon as I make two edits in close succession (which happens *often* – I’m sloppy), I am presented with a “human verification” and a **totally unreadable captcha.** It takes an average of five reloads to get a marginally readable one, and even then I’m guessing (and sometimes guessing wrong).

Please tune down the filter, or at least switch to a readable captcha.

In fact, wasn’t there previously a rule that once contributors had enough reputation, they’d be trusted not to be bots? Did that get switched off or am I remembering this wrong?

Answer: 
The throttling should be changed in case somebody makes a typo and needs to make a quick edit.

Instead of no two edit should be within 10 seconds, the logic should be, **no more than 2 edits every 20 seconds** for example.

This means that 2 edits can be 1 second apart, as long as you do not have a 3rd edit, when the 1st edit was within 20 seconds ago.

For example, edits at 0 seconds, 1 seconds, 19 seconds should trigger a captcha.

Edits at 0 seconds, 1 seconds, 21 seconds should not trigger a captcha.

This would avoid 90% of the annoying captchas.
Google announced today that they've made reCAPTCHAs considerably easier to read. [But *only* if you're not a robot](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-just-got-easier-but-only-if.html):

> 
> As part of this, we’ve recently released an update that creates different classes of CAPTCHAs for different kinds of users. This multi-faceted approach allows us to determine whether a potential user is actually a human or not, and serve our legitimate users CAPTCHAs that most of them will find easy to solve. Bots, on the other hand, will see CAPTCHAs that are considerably more difficult and designed to stop them from getting through.
> 
> 
> 

You can [test this out](https://stackoverflow.com/captcha) of you want. Here's the CAPTCHA I got:

![88835666 - 44](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z72gk.png)

That was so easy, I even bothered to fill in the alt text on that image! And if you happen to be using a keyboard with a separate pad for numbers, you should find this even easier (I'm typing this on my laptop while standing up). 

Given how well the new human-biased system works, I'm marking this status-completed. 

Of course, if you were lying and *are* indeed a robot, you should probably not be happy about this.