You can download "Html Validator" for Firefox, in this way, you won’t need to open w3c validator anymore. With "Html Validator" you see a icon on firefox for every page you visit which tells you if it does validate or doesn’t validate.
Do you have any bot-blocking code in your .htaccess file?
No nothing out the ordinary in the htaccess file, that is just the one that’s with modx by default,
Any other things to check?
I got 500 errors literally every other time I checked Bob’s Guides at W3C for a while (actually, it may still be happening). Whenever it happened, the very next time it was guaranteed to work fine. I never did figure it out but I did learn to stop caring about it.