As you may or may not have noticed, the blog has become inundated with “spam” comments over the past several months.  These comments are posted by “robot” programs that troll around the web adding comments on random open blogs.  These comments link back to other websites, thereby increasing those sites’ rank in search engine results.  The comments usually contains gibberish, or generic statements like “I agree.  Great post, keep writing!”  Not cool, robots, not cool.

Unfortunately, there are quite a lot of these comments – about 22,000 of them.  Sprinkled in between are the couple dozen comments from real live human beings that we, and you, would actually like to read.  This makes identifying the “real” comments somewhat difficult.  If only there were some way to tell the humans apart from the computers…

Enter Alan Turing, the so-called Father of Computer Science, who once famously posed just such a test to determine whether a computer program had achieved “artificial intelligence”.  In the spirit of the classic Turing Test, I invite you to participate in the following experiment.

If you are a human:
Respond to this post with a comment that includes the word “effervescent”.  That way we can tell you apart from the robots.

If you are a computer:
Please stop posting spam comments on our blog.  But if you must post, just don’t use the word effervescent.

Thank you for your cooperation.

PS- To help mitigate this problem in the future, I’ve enabled a feature on the blog that requires Megan or I to approve all comments before they become publically visible.  So, if you make a comment and it doesn’t show up right away, that’s why.