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I think I go annoyed of how often do Stackexchange sites like Serverfault.com and StackOverflow.com want to verify I'm not a robot. I'm already coming close to doubt myself - maybe I am?

For example, sometimes when I write a to long question or misspell a tag, I get asked if I'm not a robot first, then I get my error, correct it and press to submit, and ... am asked for captcha again.

What the reasons could be? Maybe I am using a suspicious IP address or something alike? Or maybe there's a way I can make the server less suspective by setting up something in my profile?

I use prepaid O2 Telefónica 3G in Prague, CZ. I run Ubuntu 10.10 and use its standard Firefox 3.6.10 with some extensions like NoScript, BetterPrivacy, etc (but no TOR, proxies or alike).

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You most commonly will get the Robot page when you edit a question or comment more than once within a short time frame (I don't remember the exact time frame, but it's something reasonable like 20 seconds).

If your getting the Robot page without doing quick back to back edits, it's possible your Internet connection is doubling packets and causing the server to think you're making double edits.

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  • But isn't it illogical? Do robots ever edit their posts? I've always thought they just post and forget.
    – Ivan
    Oct 8, 2010 at 13:54
  • Robots might simply follow every link, and therefor would get caught by this. Webcrawlers (like Google) are "guided" and wouldn't simply follow every link.
    – Chris S
    Oct 8, 2010 at 14:22
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The robot check hits even high-rep users. If I'm going through and retagging a bunch of things I'll get the captcha on every 5th edit or so. That said, it seems something has gone grink and people are getting that page more often.

See also, Frequent human verification

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