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I typed up an answer, and it tells me I have to have a name and a password to post. Apparently my session timed out while I was researching the answer. So I click the "Login" button, and my answer got lost. Even though if I tried to POST it, it should technically be saved in the browser.

So I think, whatever. I remember what the answer was, so I re-type a brief version of it. This time I am taken to image verification page. The images are tiny, and hard to tell what's in them. For example, there's the bottom of the street sign, is that a street sign? There's this gingerbread house with live animals sitting inside them. Maybe it only looks like it's a picture of food?

So after about 10 tries, I finally hit a few cases where I know that I identified the image correctly; however, I keep being taken to another one. So I enable all cookies (just in case), and continue. Same story. I look at the privacy policy, the cookies that were blocked when the page loaded, continue being blocked.

I decide to refresh the page and try posting again. Bye bye typed text; good thing I copy-and-pasted my answer this time. Image verification. I answer it correctly for sure, but it keeps asking me new ones. I refresh the page, and this time I'm allowed to post.

Questions:

  • Why am I asked to prove I'm not a robot if I don't have any posting problems?

  • Why did it keep taking me to image verification even when I answered correctly, and I had to refresh the page to stop it from doing that?

p.s., I have IE9.

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  • $\begingroup$ While I agree it is annoying, here are two points: (1) the saved answer thing is saved on the server, not in your browser. So if you wrote that logged out and then logged in but had to leave the page, there's no reason to expect the answer to be preserved. (2) If you generally disable cookies, you shouldn't really complain when website which essentially use cookies from several domains won't work in a consistent and designed manner. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Commented Aug 26, 2015 at 7:34

1 Answer 1

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This happened to me a good deal, I keep a huge file with typeset pieces of Latex. I finally figured out that if I begin by typing a half line of gibberish lqhgbaekjvbklhbvadkjlshbvl before pasting in any Latex or uploading an image, the system starts out by thinking I am human and there is no problem. Once things are mostly in shape i delete the gibberish, then click to add the answer.

Same thing about a long answer. It is generally worth keeping a separate text editor window open on your own machine, in which to save long items of Latex/mathjax that may need to be found. For me, this happens because my ISP seems to quit every other day for threeminutes at a time, sometimes submissions are lost.

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