I am not a robot!

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 1

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

Well, actually, 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:

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 and the general internet 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}

Answer 2

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?

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Really?!!?!!

Granted I was on a friend's PC, not logged in... but there's got to be better alternative to captchas.

Wait, maybe it should have been tbckno seems with a b

Answer 5

I didn't notice any CAPTCHAs on here for over a year until today, and the irony of the one below wasn't wasted on me.

I think the difficulty of the CAPTCHA is a separate issue to why they are being shown. Surely the purpose of a CAPTCHA is exactly as described - to differentiate between robots and humans. So the fact I saw one meant the SO algorithm thought I might be a robot with high probability. Why?

I posted a normal question at my first attempt (no rapid edits) from an established account using my normal machine on my normal IP at a normal time of day - it seems more like a pre-emptive strike rather than a calculated guess that I'm a bot.

Answer 6

Google announced today that they've made reCAPTCHAs considerably easier to read. But only if you're not a robot:

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 of you want. Here's the CAPTCHA I got:

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.

Answer 7

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

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.