You may have noticed, but probably not, that last week there was a period where you could not add comments here.  While that was purely a mistake on my part (upgraded my server and it broke something), it did have me wondering why my email volume was significantly light.  You see, every time a comment is added here, or even attempted to be added I get an email.  So I get several emails a day about spammers trying to leave a comment.  I've built the system to at least not show you the spam comments, but the emails are driving me crazy.  I thought that when they saw the comments were denied (I tell them "You are a spammer, go away") that they would give up.  Boy was I wrong.

Tonight I implemeted a new captcha system you must fill out before leaving a comment.  I have used it many times in testing and I can attest that they are relatively easy to figure out.  Not near as complicated as some. I am using a service called "reCAPTCHA" that not only implements a captcha system to distinguish the humans from the robots, but also helps make the world a better place by having humans help computers digitize books.  When digitizing books, the computer can have difficultly reading all the word perfectly.  Human interaction is needed when the computer can't make out the word.  That's where reCAPTCHA comes to the rescue.  The system will give you two words to type.  One of the word images is known, the other not known.  If the human solves the known word, it is assumed that the unknown word is correct.  It is of course sent to many people to help reduce anomilies.

I'm sorry to make you jump through so many hoops to leave a comment, but I'm hoping that now I won't have to ignore half my incoming emails beacuase of spammers.

Also, this was all developed in my new dev environment/setup. Watch for more to come.