It has come to my attention (the hard way) that Blogger has started using an insane new style of captcha. The sound version is incomprehensible and the written one may take a dozen tries to get through. I don't have captchas turned on for this blog (I never usually get comments anyway, and moderation is turned on for any post over 14 days) but if you do, you might like to check that, depending on the number of comments you get; if you have "word verification" enabled, it might well deter human commenters.
I was quite surprised, checking the settings, that moderation isn't particularly granular; unlike other systems, there's no way, for example, to specify you want to moderate commenters for the first post or two, after which they're considered ok. Moderation is either always on, or based on age of post (by default, posts aged over 14 days). If you have a high-traffic blog, that makes moderation almost useless to keep spam at bay, leaving word verification as your only option. I have a nasty (and rather cynical, but not necessarily incorrect) feeling that this particularly user-unfriendly captcha is a ploy by Google to get people to take anti-spam measures off their blogs - as making money through spamming is what Google is all about.
Edit: I've had a Google fan point me at a link to Google's new no-captcha captcha system, which sounds grand in principle but clearly is not fully operational. It's still not clear why I was presented with a captcha in the first place as I was logged in, commenting on a blog where I'd commented before, and the post was a recent one.
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