A while ago I installed a captcha-based system called reCAPTCHA in my comment system. CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) work like this: Some garbled text is diplayed that is very hard for a spam bot to read, but relatively easy and only slightly annowing for a real human to type. It worked well. reCAPTCHA is even better because the hard to read text is not computer generated, it actually comes from real books that are being digitized but on those words the computers are having a hard time reading it. So you do a little bit of useful work and I get no comment spam.

Lately, it worked too well. Turns out that a pretty serious bug shipped in a recent version of reCAPTCHA that marked every comment as spam. I went into my comment spam folder and manually approved a few of these comments. I also installed the fix. I apologize and I hope I didn’t miss anything.

Your comments are very welcome and highly encouraged. They make me feel like someone reads the stuff I post here. Sorry about the bug!