Project Euler Forum

Can someone clarify the rules surrounding lockout timers for answer submissions? I've been running into increasingly long timers which feels weird to me. I'm guessing that some automated system suspects me of cheating because I've been solving 5-10 problems per day this week. This is actually not so different from my typical ProjectEuler usage pattern: I wander off for several months to a year, then I eventually come back and find I'm able to burn through a bunch of problems that stumped me before.

If it would somehow be useful for me to prove that I have reasonable solutions for all of my recent answer submissions, I'm happy to give someone access to my github repo where I store all my code. (Of course it's private in keeping with PE rules regarding spoilers.) I doubt anyone actually cares though? Anyway I've also solved the 13 most recent problems, which seems nontrivial to do by cheating.

I don't think I'm being locked out due to wrong submissions. I've submitted wrong several times, but probably at least 75% of my recent submissions have been correct - it's not like I'm trying to brute force the problems or something.

This is not a huge deal, but it's kinda annoying when I accidentally mistype an answer and then get locked out for 150s. The timers have also been steadily increasing and I'm worried that the annoyance will continue to increase. I'd like to at least understand more about the rules here - like if I stop submitting for a few days then will the timers go back down?

We're not able to publish actual details of the mechanism, but we have worked very hard at making the system as fair as possible. Indeed, there will always be outliers, but in reality the vast majority of member will never even see a CAPTCHA. Solving a number of recent problems will cause wait times to increase more than problems in the archives. I can also say that each hour of not submitting an answer will reduce your wait time.

Thanks for the response! I understand about not wanting to publish specifics, and your general response is still helpful to me.