OK, I've Had Enough ...

... of these automated intrusions into our blog.

I wish there was another way of doing this, BUT ... it appears I will have to turn on the "word verification option" of Blogger, to help repel the unwanted invaders to our little corner of the blogosphere. This will be a little bit of a PITA for us all, but hopefully it will work, as advertised.

What is the word verification option?

The "word verification" option requires you to type the letters of a "word" (a loose term, there) in order to complete the word verification step. As if now, people leaving comments on our blog will be required to complete this additional step, or else the comments will not be posted.

You will now notice an additional field below the little window where you type in your comments. Just above that field, you will see the "wavy" word you have to type into the additional field before you hit the "Login and Publish" button.

The following is an example of what you will now see, just below the comments field where you type in your comments:

Please note - the word will not be "uvama" each time you post a comment - it will be some sort of automated series of letters that will be different each time.

What this does is to prevent automated systems from adding comments to our blog, since it takes a human being to read the word and pass this step. What we've encountered here is called comment spam. Since a lot of this is done automatically by software which can't pass the word verification, enabling this option is a good way to prevent many such unwanted comments.

Once again, sorry for the added step when creating a comment, but hopefully we'll have a cleaner comments area, and we won't have to worry about chain or golf equipment vending infidels.