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Rare occasion. I actually have two questions about Apple products and it complainsError message: you can only post once every 20 minutes.

What gives?

I don't quite understand the rationale whichever way I think about it. Even if this is something to deter spammers, am I expected to turn into a spammer on an individual SE site suddenly, although having gained rep on several others already?

To add insult to injury I was handed a CAPTCHA on the last attempt. Perhaps because I kept retrying to post the question? Although, I kept retrying because there is no indication of when the 20 minutes are through?! ;)

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  • If it helps, I get CAPTCHAs now and then as well, especially while moderating a lot of flagged posts in a short time :-)
    – nohillside Mod
    Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 8:33
  • Yes - CAPTCHA's are actually more necessary for high rep users as opposed to low rep users. Imagine the mess that could be caused if a cookie from a moderator were used by a bot.
    – bmike Mod
    Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 15:15
  • @bmike: yes, this is a fact I didn't consider. But that's only the CAPTCHAs and not the posting of questions. Thanks nevertheless for pointing it out. Much appreciated.
    – 0xC0000022L
    Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 20:10

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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It's considered to be a feature, see https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=20+minutes for quite a lot of information about this.

The error message should have explained that this limitation is lifted for users with reputation above 125. If that notice wasn't provided, please indicate that and we'll turn this into a bug report.

This behavior is documented at:

Why are low-rep users rate-limited when posting questions?

The rational for implementing this feature is covered in this blog post. I think SE is a bit proud that most people don't see the crap that gets posted (or wants to be posted by spammers / scammers / disruptive people) on the sites.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/02/new-question-answer-rate-limits/

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  • Still can't see this as a feature, but thanks for the answer.
    – 0xC0000022L
    Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 9:18
  • 3
    @0xC0000022L I've added some of the back story on why this is a feature. I agree it would be nice to not hobble people without rep, but I've seen what happens without these controls and it's not pretty. New accounts have regularly abused the non-rate limited posting and it adds burden on the moderation team. That’s the feature, to reduce maintenance labor.
    – bmike Mod
    Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 15:20
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Extremely annoying when you're not a spammer 😞

Especially as the error message is displayed below the post button… but the page scrolls back to the top after having clicked that button!

Especially as we can't even post on a different SE site during that period.

I see a "discard draft" but I don't find where I can see my drafts. It doesn't appear in the "questions" tab of my profile. And there's nothing about that in the help center.

Especially as I'm a member for 13 years! With only a 101 reputation on the AskDifferent site but 2.511 on StackOverflow.

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