I made a change last week to my comment system, where someone now has to put in an answer to a simple mathematical question (like “What is eight – 5?). The last few days, I’ve had zero spam in my comments section, whereas I was receiving about 30-50 a day.

On other subjects, yesterday was the start of Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) where writers (or wannabe writers) spend the month attempting to write at least 50,000 words of a novel (or a novel in 50,000 words). I’m 4182 words into my novel right now, and it’s a part of the Tales of Reagul series I’ve been writing for most of my adult life. This one is called A Season of Kings, and it begins during the year 180 or so BCE near Rome and then continues on the planet of Reagul (which is what most of the novels have been about). For those interested, this is the series that actually involves the name that’s part of my website: littlesarbonn.com. One of the central characters in this series is Sarbonn, the Sorceror, and his two apprentices Walner and Chandlin. Anyhoo. Have a great Friday.

One of the things that has bothered me with blogging is the overwhelming amount of spam I receive from bots and what I suspect just might be aliens from the Planet Xenon. Every now and then, for the sake of living an existence that equates to paddling upstream at the bottom of a waterfall, someone actually sends me a real blog comment. And most of the time, it would not surprise me if I delete it because it gets caught up in the tons of spam I receive as well.

I was reading an article today that was published a year or so ago by Mark of Bloggersjournal.com, and he made a bunch of interesting suggestions. I’ve always used Akismet, which is a pretty good spam collection service, but now I’ve installed a challenge (CATCHA) service that asks a random mathematical question (an easy one) before someone can leave a post. Let’s see how that works now. Of course, if you’re completely mathematically challenged, I apologize, but as I love math (those who know me definitely know that), it’s kind of my thing. I did decline the advanced calculus version, however, and the Sports trivia one would have kept me out of posting on my own site, so again, let’s see how this works out.

What amazes me is that this type of junk (the spam) actually exists. It serves no purpose, and I can’t imagine a SINGLE person in the world who actually buys anything that’s thrown at them with spam. Other than scamming someone who accidentally clicks on their junk links, I’ve not seen a single purpose behind it whatsoever.

But that’s just me, and people have often said I’m a bit strange. And not just the spammers either.