Word verification: Necessary or a huge pain?

My friend Sherri over at Matter Of Fact posed a question yesterday on her blog about word verification on blog comments. Her question was is word verification on comments necessary?

Currently I have word verification on comments on all my blogs. I’m really starting to rethink them though. Sherri included two links on her blog to posts that argued against word verification and the ladies that wrote those posts had valid points.

Then looking around this morning for posts written in favor of word verification, I was surprised at the very low number that I found. And I actually didn’t find even one post proclaiming word verification was a great thing. Not one. (I should add here that I only looked for about 45 minutes so I probably could have found one if I had continued but honestly, I was bored.) The only positive comments that I found were in comments on posts questioning the need for word verifications.

That’s when I decided that I too would run a poll about word verification and its necessity or its problems, whichever applies to you. You can find it in the top right hand corner on this blog. I’ll leave it up for 30 days. I’m really interested in the outcome.

Until the poll is over I’m going to keep the word verification on my comment section. After you vote leave a comment on this post (I’ve added a link under the poll…or will have by the time this is posted.) and tell me why you voted the way you did. In 30 days I’ll make the final decision on word verification and my blogs. Who knows, maybe one of you will change my mind about their need.