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

[Well, actually](http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html), it was *repaired*. Two weeks ago, we found a bug that for a long time prevented edits from being throttled *at all* (except for very narrow exceptions).

For the record, I posted this in our internal chat room:

![prescient chat message](https://i.stack.imgur.com/f8DXG.png)

Thanks for proving me right :)

In all seriousness: The throttling was fixed to do what it was supposed to do all along, and not technically turned up a notch. I'm well aware that this doesn't really make a difference to the user; I'm just explaining what was going on.

> 
> and a **totally unreadable captcha.**
> 
> 
> 

Yes, this is a problem. Both [Meta](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=recaptcha+hard+difficult) and the [general internet](http://www.google.com/search?q=recaptcha+hard+difficult+unreadable&tbs=qdr:y) are overflowing with complaints that many reCAPTCHAs have become close to unsolvable recently. This is something we have to tackle one way the other.

> 
> 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?
> 
> 
> 

You are remembering correctly, for the most part. 10k users are only throttled to 10 seconds per edit (unlike the 30 seconds for lower-rep users).

**Update.** We have been heavily discussing this issue internally recently, and we all agree that the current state of affairs sucks big-time. Ideally a human being would never see a captcha, and if they get one after all, it should be reasonably solvable. We're discussing several routes to go, but the bottom line is that our throttling/bot detection needs to become smarter.

For the time being, we've made a change that should at least heavily reduce this issue in the particular case discussed here (submission of edits). It should now\* be close to impossible for a 10k user and much less probable than now for a <10k user to hit this throttle during normal operation.

This is certainly not the end of it, merely a step, but I hope you agree it's the right direction.

\*next build
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.