Verification?

Image by colodio via Flickr

Hello, my reader (I'd make it plural, but I think usually only one person reads this, so singular is more fitting). Question for you: do you mind the comment verification? You know, that little, "Enter the characters you see" box? It was suggested that removing it might improve the commentship here, but, alas, while the number of comments has, in fact, increased slightly, they're primarily all spam comments, and I'm thinking nothing was really gained by removing the box (except the spam).

So, the question: do you mind the comment box? Would it upset you if I put it back? I've added a poll (over on the right; the title looks a little funky in this layout, but oh well) where you can vote for your answer (note to readers on Facebook: you'll have to go to the original blog post to see the poll - now, there's a chicken and egg scenario - I wanted to link the post IN the post, but didn't have the post URL to link to until after publishing! I could've guessed at it, but what I did was just post the post, copy the URL, then edit the post to put it in). If you need to expound, or just want to say, "Hi!" feel free to add a comment.