For the past few weeks, I've had comments completely disabled on this site because I was a little peeved about comment spam. I'm not talking idiotic jerks who flood comment sections just for the fuck of it. They usually take care of themselves with a quick IP ban. No, I'm talking the blog-comments-section equivalent of e-mail spammers. Morons who post advertisements for penis enlargement, online casinos, and teen-sex webcams.

As much as I love teen sex (ahem), spam is annoying and evil. I came up with a solution the other day, but I'm not entirely sure it's going to work. A lot of big online sites stop automated account signups and whatnot by requiring users to type in a word or passcode randomly generated and displayed as an image. This makes things harder for bots. I've tried something similar, but less sophisticated.

Basically, to post a comment, you type in your user info as normal. But before you go to type in the text of the comment, you write the word that appears in the little image. If you type it correctly, the Post button will be enabled and you can go to town.

I'm not sure this will work. If the bots just send data directly to the comment-posting script, then I'll have to do a little bit more hacking to get the comment-posting script to check that the security word is correct. But we'll see if that's necessary in the coming days.