The anti-spam-question has been implemented in the commenting forms of Pinside.com to combat an evil known as "comment spam." By asking a user to perform a simple math, we are basically making sure the user is in fact a human as opposed to a computer program.

Why would we want to check that? Well, some nasty computer programs crawl the web trying to exploit websites that allow the posting of content by generating posts containing advertisements. By asking this question we make it much harder for these programs to do this because they don't understand what we want them to do.

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we hope you agree that having to make this simple math is preferable to having this site filled with comment spam. Thanks!