Almost-Free Speech

I made a change in the comments procedure today. I've been noticing that automated spam has been hitting the comments more and more often, but I was still willing to weed it out by hand to keep down the barriers for actual readers who want to comment. This morning, though, I was hit by a barrage of spam within just a couple of minutes. I'm not sure how many actual comments were left, because for some reason, some or all of the comments generated multiple notices to my inbox. I had about 400 new messages this morning, and it goes without saying that it took me a while to go through them and delete all the new spam. At that point, it took me no time in deciding to activate the word verification feature to at least stop machines from joining the discussion. I'm late to this, as I've noticed that most (though not all) blogs I visit already it installed, so I assume that everyone is used to it. The vast majority of readers who visit this blog decide to keep their thoughts to themselves, so there won't be a lot of people inconvenienced by the extra effort now required to leave their mark. And I'm not cutting back on who's allowed to comment. Anonymous comments are still possible and available, so most everything is like it was. You'll just have to take one more step, but you won't be met with insincere praise disguising blatant pleas to visit some advertising website (and talk about insincere--some of the comments this morning praised my "beautiful graphics").