I had been a member of this site for a few years but hadn't logged in for a few months (reformat/reinstall and lose cookies). Since the old accounts got ditched, I had to re-register. Who ever chose the provider of those verification images ought to have his eyeballs peeled! Between myself and my 2 kids (all of whom have great eyes) it took around 20 refreshes of the verification image to get one that was actually discernable and that was only be downloading the png of the image and running it through a filter to make the numbers/letters more apparent.

I'd suggest the site admins take a peek at that! It took us 10 minutes of work to get registered and I suspect that most users wouldn't want that hassle just to see comments.