Robot Housekeeping

Those of us who wish to leave a comment on posts here are going to have to perform an extra step, at least for awhile, as I've added word verification to the site. RoD has been plagued by automatically-generated spam comments that are proliferating wildly, and which have overwhelmed the Google spam filter's ability to weed them out. That means that I spend a lot of time hunting spam down and deleting it—yesterday, in fact, I spent close to two hours combing through all the comments pages going back to the beginning of RoD in order to delete some 3,700 spam comments that had either clogged the filters or attached themselves to posts.

First, let me assure everyone that commenting is still perfectly anonymous, if you choose it to be. When you log in to comment you will now see something like this:

You can still choose to click on the anonymous button, but you will have to type in the sequence of numbers and letters you see below the comment box. In the case above it would be:

4164 ionewer

You don't have to worry about capitalizing the letters in the nonsense word so long as you get the sequence right.

Occasionally you'll see a number picture that is unclear, or a letter sequence that has been tortured into illegibility. If that happens, just click on the little round arrow right next to the space bar and the combination will change. You can change it as many times as you need to in order to find one that you can read and type back.

Many of you probably already know how to do this, so apologies if this seems pedantic, but I'm posting it here for those to whom this is all new.

And yes, this is a pain in the ass, but the alternative to the above is for me to go back to moderating comments--which I'd really rather not do as it is a hassle for everyone to have to wait to see their comment posted, and a waste of time for me.

Let me know you thoughts and questions and I'll answer them all.

yours, SeekHer