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I am forever being asked if I am a bot, simply because I am so active, especially with the edit button. Can someone write a program that I can click on and it will do it for me?

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    And I even got checked when I asked this question.
    – Arlen Beiler
    Oct 26, 2010 at 12:13
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    Well, after you gain enough reputation (10k I think) the captcha rates are lowered.
    – jjnguy
    Oct 26, 2010 at 12:16
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    Lowered!!! Why not stopped?!!! I sometimes get five captchas for every question I ask.
    – Arlen Beiler
    Oct 26, 2010 at 12:17
  • @Arlen Er. In a row? Or you're editing five times?
    – Michael Mrozek
    Oct 26, 2010 at 12:18
  • Dang, there's already a project called Skynet on GitHub.
    – detly
    Oct 26, 2010 at 12:25
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    How do we know that you are not actually a bot? In fact, it would be quite clever of you to post this - throwing us off your trail. But I'm on to you...
    – user27414
    Oct 26, 2010 at 12:31
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    The lowered rate at 10k (yes, @jjn, it's 10k) is extremely lowered. I actually haven't run into one at all since breaking 10k, even during periods of high activity. Besides, wouldn't a program to solve a captcha be... kinda letting the robots win?
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Oct 26, 2010 at 12:31
  • @Mickeal, edited 5 times.
    – Arlen Beiler
    Oct 26, 2010 at 14:15
  • @Grace... the robots have won, we just don't know it yet.
    – Beth Lang
    Nov 20, 2010 at 4:14

2 Answers 2

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We need Captchas to prevent bad behavior. Someone could easily write a program that would create lots of bad edits or ask lots of bad questions. Stack Overflow could be overrun with spam.

Even though you have some rep, having Captchas in place minimises the amount of damage you can do with your account and also minimises the amount of damage others can do with your account. It's a safety net.

Also, the whole point of a Captcha is that humans are able to solve them and programs can not. If someone could write a program to accomplish this, the Captcha would be outdated and a new one would have to be implemented.

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    Perhaps a question where you had to spot irony would prevent bots pretending to people?
    – Martin Beckett
    Oct 26, 2010 at 15:29
  • It still stands to reason that once you have reached a certain rep level, you have something to lose, and are unlikely to use an evil program to flood SO with crap.
    – Pekka
    Oct 26, 2010 at 15:29
  • @Pekka: True, but you still need to stop those who would do so in other people's names. Lots of hacking goes on via 'bots.
    – RobH
    Oct 27, 2010 at 0:32
  • @RobH I don't see a problem here: Accumulating thousands of reputation points is a lot of work, and the account would get burned and shut down when you run the bot once. Too much effort for what ultimately be zero effect, because all bot-generated contributions from that account would be easy to delete
    – Pekka
    Oct 27, 2010 at 11:06
  • @Pekka, if you have a high repping account and it was hacked, someone could write a bot to do really destructive things. It might be a while before it was caught.
    – Sam Becker
    Oct 27, 2010 at 12:40

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