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?
I honestly think that the only problem the editing system *might* be bringing to Stackoverflow is large-scale vandalism. When it comes to that, I believe there are three attack sources

1. Anonymous users
2. 2k- rep users
3. 2k+ rep users

The review system already tackles the first two. I personally think that it's highly unlikely that a spammer would train robot accounts until they have 2k rep so they can bypass the review system (think how hard it was to get your first 2k rep)

That's why I think that **5 seconds** is a very decent waiting time between edits and when you're gonna show some CAPTCHAs, why not a user-friendly one like [SolveMedia](http://www.solvemedia.com)

**Edit:** Don't get me wrong, I'm all for stopping spammers and whatnots. But do we (You, Stackoverflow) need to nuke the house just get rid of cockroaches?

**Edit 2:** @nhahtdh's scenario is a perfect example of when a CAPTCHA should be deployed, when there's a *suspicious* behavior.

The key here is gradually escalating the measurements:  

* 10 edit in 1 minute on different posts => suspicious => introduce CAPTCHA
* Same user did it again? Introduce CAPTCHA & Inform a moderator.
* Same user did it AGAIN? Suspend editing privileges.

In this case, you didn't annoy legit users AND minimized the damage of the **2k rep user** (and I don't think this will happen a lot).

Note: It took me 6 CAPTCHA retries to make this edit.