Remember that little addition I mentioned not long ago, the one that allows you to leave comments here without having to decipher warped, twisted “Captcha” text?

When leaving a comment, all you have to do is just check a box to indicate that you’re a human, then voila: you’re done!

As a general rule, when I go to the admin panel for my blog, there are generally four or five comments in the spam queue, and it has gotten to the point that I never go to the spam queue because my multi-layered spam filtering system seems to be dead on when it comes to spotting a fake.

When I switched to the check box option instead of Captcha, something dramatic happened:  today, there are 127 comments in the spam queue.

I went through the seven pages of comments it had marked as spam and checked, just to make sure. Not one single comment there was legit. Almost all of them came from one IP address, though user names varied and content was generally a list of porn links.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this: I’m quite pleased that the spam still isn’t getting through to my main queue, but I’m concerned because for the comments to even be marked as spam, it means that there either must be a person leaving these things who’s actually checking the little box, or that there’s some software that manages to check the box on its own.

Still, as long as my spam software still recognizes the spam for what it is, I’m not going to complain!