Comment spam is the bane of anyone who runs a blog, automated services like Akismet can help (no-follow can’t), but the newest method of checking to see if a commenter is a human who can ostensibly add to the conversation is a CAPTCHA. It’s a long boring acronymn that is better not remembered so I’m not going to spell it out here, but it means: “difficult to read image to keep ads for ‘\/18GR/\’ out of my comments”.
The bar for this is actually quite low as the spammers have yet to rent grid time from Sun or Amazon’s EC2 and create distributed character recognition programs (though in writing that sentence, it occurs to me that they would probably just use the botnet that they had for spamming people anyway).
As of right now, a minimally difficult CAPTCHA is fine and likely won’t drive your readers nuts or cause them to do a double take.
Example: CAPTCHA from Coding Horror
While others are apparently under the assumption that the combined computer science prowess of China is apparently knocking at their blog door (did you know China has more honors students than the US has students?).
Example: Jeff Freeman’s CAPTCHA
Beyond being difficult for humans to read, it relies on subtle grammatical choices, which will quite likely not be caught by non-native english speakers.
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WHAT TO DO NOW?