>Was thinking about this ... I reflexively hate bots, but it might be a UX thing -- maybe it's the popup. The pop diverts my attention from where I was looking

>Was thinking about this ... I reflexively hate bots, but it might be a UX thing -- maybe it's the popup. The pop diverts my attention from where I was looking on the site and feels like an intrusion. Same as if someone comes to your desk and grabs your mouse. So .. maybe an improvement would be to have a status-line or ticker-like text field that doesn't pop up or obscure any part of the underlying page design. But it wasn't nearly as bad when the avatar was male or nonhuman.