I Give Up!!!

They finally did it. 

They broke me. 

I held out and held out and tried and tried to deal with the garbage, to suck it up and know that what I was doing was for the greater good, perhaps not to bring about world peace, but peace within my inner circle, and finally had to put my foot down and say enough is enough.  I should have known from the get-go that my grand vision was doomed, my refusal to let them bother me in favor of happy blog readers wouldn't...couldn't...last. 

Spammers.

Blog comments by incessant and tireless robotic pfishing services, asking me to buy Viagra, visit their websites, talk to a sexy woman, grow my man-parts, leaving comments telling me what great content I have, what an informative site, how they've shared it with their brother/cousin/uncle/friend/pet raccoon. 

Innundated.

I remember, about a year ago, caving to requests by people who said Word Verification made commenting on my blog difficult.  And plentiful, happy blog readers are what I want, right? 

Absolutely.

And the very minute I un-checked the box in my settings to remove the dreaded Word Verification option, I realized I'd unleashed Pandora's Box, sold my soul to the lame attempts of robo-advertisers (?), if you can call them that, to suck some poor devil in, to grab them in their clutches and do who-knows-what to them or to their pristine, previously virus-free computer.  Are people really such suckers?  Who reads that stuff, anyway? 

And the first 2 comments came through, captured, in my continued quest to maintain some semblance of control, by my always-enabled author-moderation settings. 

And I knew, even then, that I'd ultimately cave.

And, last week, while on vacation and not consistently checking e-mail, not at all checking my blog or reading others, I managed to amass 72 (seventy-two!!!) spam comments, and not. one. single. legitimate. one.

Which told me 2 things.

1) Word Verification is going back up (I put it up today)

2) I don't get any readers when I'm not posting (well, duh!)

Depressing all-around.

So, Word Verification is back up, and blog posts are being crafted, and hopefully all will be well and sunny again in the blogosphere, for me at least.  And, if you have difficulty leaving comments because of it, please, please keep trying - I'm seriously craving the legitimate blog love these days!!