I have upgraded my comment spam protection, reinstalled Akismet and disabled Cookies for Comments (it was slowing the site down a bit too much) as well as switching off moderation so that commenters no longer get put into a queue, their comment should appear immediately; if they’re a spammer it won’t, they will be forever blacklisted and perhaps even burned at the steak (sic).

Anyway, I was tweaking the Akismet settings, as you do, and noticed this option, which was added since I last used the antispam plugin:

“Use a nonce on the comment form”

So, what’s all that about? A nonce in Brit-speak is a slang term for a prisoner convicted of sex crimes against children segregated from other inmates for their own safety (supposedly derived from “not on normal courtyard exercise”, although that sounds as spurious as the port out starboard home derivation of posh, to me, it’s much more likely to be a deviation of nance/nancy or perhaps from the word for envoys of the Roman Catholic Church, Papal Nuncios!

The reference by Akismet is not, of course, related to the vernacular of the criminal fraternity and is a security term meaning “number used once”, which Akismet creates in your site’s comment as an invisible “captcha” to prevent spam bots from posting their nonsense to your blog. If I understand it correctly, it effectively does the same job as Cookies for Comments but without having to load a cookie, so the site should be slightly faster to load but remain spam free.