The comment policy has changed; check the page links for the details.  The big change: I’ve turned off the CAPTCHA page that would be presented for comments judged to be “borderline” spam by the spam filter software.

For those not aware, CAPTCHA is the name given to the funny letters and numbers on weird backgrounds that you sometimes have to type in to do things on certain web sites.  The idea was that computers couldn’t read those letters and numbers, but humans could; thus, each solved CAPTCHA was proof that a human had done whatever it was that had been done.

CAPTCHA had issues even from the beginning.  They present obvious issues for the blind, and were often simple enough to be read by modern OCR software.  Because of this, I never turned it on for every comment, and any comment rejected because of the CAPTCHA just went into the moderation queue.  But I’m now convinced that CAPTCHA has reached the end of its useful life.

So when a commenter on my last post expressed his dissatisfaction with my CAPTCHA, I decided it was time to turn it off.  And so, references to it have been expunged from my comment policy.

The Esperanto translation of my comment policy has also been updated, in the hopes that I might someday post a little more often in that language.  It’s also been moved to a page.