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It's a very common behavior to refine answers several times after submitting them. Most of the time, the refinement is just adding and removing several characters or words. You might notice some other issues right after the edit. It's pretty common to face a CAPTCHA. The current threshold is a little unacceptable (specially for slow connections).

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It seems a lot of people "forgot" what is the purpose of the captcha -- it is not to annoy people, but to check if the user is human. Constantly checking if user is human is an absurd -- instead of solving the problem, SE created one. –  greenoldman Nov 3 '10 at 9:31
catpcha are unacceptable like they are now.. –  dynamic Feb 28 '11 at 21:33

4 Answers 4

up vote 9 down vote accepted


  • for edits -- reduced by two-thirds

additionally: assuming you are a logged in user and have >= 200 reputation, after successfully completing one captcha we now suppress captcha for 5 minutes on your account.

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It's alright for some, you have more than 10k rep. Situation for the rest of us is dire. Stack Overflow admins are out of touch as to what this site is like to use for the majority of users. –  Colonel Panic Aug 7 '12 at 23:13
why is this problematic? Complete one and you don't have to complete another for 5 minutes minumum. Can you describe what you are doing in more detail? –  Jeff Atwood Aug 9 '12 at 0:01
I see Recaptchas after making several edits to an answer in quick succession or posting on a new Stack Exchange site. But the rate doesn't bother me so much as the difficulty meta.stackexchange.com/questions/75965/… –  Colonel Panic Aug 9 '12 at 8:38
You don't consider a captcha as frequently as every 5 minutes tedious? Try it for a while... –  Basic Aug 30 '12 at 11:23

I have several possible solutions:

  1. Take the edit magnitude (the number of characters edited) into account. Don't ask for a captcha for a number of small edits.
  2. Just increase the threshold.
  3. Take the rep into account. Either use a step-function to reduce captchas after a specific rep or decrease captcha count as the rep goes high. However, if you chose this route, you should make sure there's a maximum limit so that if a high-rep account is hijacked, not much harm can be done.
  4. Remove that stupid image. It's a pain to wait for it to load on slow and high latency connections like mine.
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+1 for suggestion of image removal; see also meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58917/… –  polygenelubricants Jul 29 '10 at 12:43

Just as another example of why this is sometimes required: in cases where the preview doesn't quite match the posted version (e.g. for links or code formatting) it can be a bit of a trial-and-error process. CAPTCHA makes it that bit more tedious.

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That's a good point. Sometimes the preview pane gets it wrong and it takes you a few goes to find what the issue is. –  cletus Jul 3 '09 at 15:41

The limits should be much more relaxed, especially if the captcha has been recently hit. Currently it is extremely annoying. And relaxed limits at 10k rep, WTF is that? How about making them relaxed at 1k or so - high enough to discourage most spammers from building it up, I suppose...

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