no-more-captchaFor years now, the web version of Brigada has relied on CAPTCHA testing to prevent spammers from plastering our comment boxes with spam. (Captcha testing is the deal where you see a warped word and try to guess the letters. We’ve never liked it; but we figured it was necessary to prevent all those “bots” from filling in our comment boxes.) But we want to encourage all the more participants to comment on our items. So starting today, we’re trying only Akismet spam prevention. We’ve actually been using Akismet in the background for some time. In fact, Akismet has intercepted nearly 1/4 million attempted spam comments so far at Brigada.org alone. We’re thankful. We hope they can keep up now, without Captcha pitching in. We’ll see.

Another improvement this week: If you’ve tried to log on at Brigada during the past week or so, you might have noticed things were beginning to slow down a bit. As our user load increased (or maybe as we picked up some denial-of-service attacks from non-like-minded folks?), our site was beginning to experience incredible strain. So this week, we swallowed hard then moved the entire site to a new cluster-driven set of servers. Things are humming again. And you’ll note: the site remains ad-free: Never have we served up Google ads, and we hope to stay ad-free and clean for your reading convenience, for as long as we can. Haven’t seen a Google-ad-free site in a while? We encourage you to visit Brigada.org. (We think it’s quite a different experience to see a site that doesn’t flash or wave banner ads in your face.) Brigada is completely supported by gifts from people like you, and by churches and agencies like yours. We’re grateful for your help that makes our work possible. God be praised.