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: 
Over almost ***four years*** on Stack Overflow, Konrad has earned almost ***150k rep***. A highly committed Stack Overflow citizen, with ***2.5k answers*** and a mere 60 questions, he's one of those users that made Stack Overflow famous. He has ***40(!) accounts*** across Stack Exchange, eight of which sport ***>1k rep***. He is ***a moderator*** on one site.

Is anybody *really and seriously* trying to tell me ***nagging such a user with CAPTCHAs*** is doing the Stack Exchange network a favor?
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.