I am not a robot.

After Monday's seriousness (thanks to everyone who commented, here and on Facebook) I'm back to normal - this time wittering about something that is slightly irritating, rather than vitally important.

Is anyone else losing patience with the captcha, anti-robot thingies that pop up each time you try to comment on a blog?

I've taken mine off, as one of my followers told me very nicely that they were driving her bonkers. It is her comment that has made me notice them more - and I agree that they are getting increasingly difficult to decipher. I get that we must take a moment to work out what they are wanting us to say - but do they have to be so obscure that letters run into each other like rain, or numbers are lost in the shadows? And if you get them wrong once, it often seems impossible to correct that on the second or third attempt.

It might help if they were a real word, and not something like EdvUlgn 61. What's that meant to mean - though anyone with a child using the phonetic reading scheme would say I should be able to read it without worrying about meanings. But I want to know what 61 EdvUlgns might look like, smell like? Are they animal, vegetable or mineral? Can I eat them? Will they eat me?

Since taking mine off, I've had a couple of ridiculous comments, and a flurry of invitations to check out a foreign bank, but blogspot seems to pick most of them up and send them to my email for checking - so they are easy to delete. But it's not been a huge problem.

So on a little blog like mine it seems, from my follower's comment, that having to prove you are a real person was putting people off.

I accept that, for those with thousands of followers, some form of filter might be necessary. But surely there has to be an easier way than making ordinary people squint at their screens trying to work out if that splodge squashed between the 't' and the 'r' is an 'e' or an 'o'. Are you quite happy deciphering EdvUlgn 61, or is it driving you bonkers, too?