I would have to log out and comment as someone else to do any testing because they allow me to do anything as the administrator. That is a pain in the neck, because it means I can’t see the changes that affect other people.

I’ll put something up on the sidebar to inform people.

– leading or trailing spaces do not count; the software trims out the ‘extra’ spaces [iirc this is endemic to html], and apparently it does this to leading or trailing spaces before passing a comment through the spam filter, and

– two spaces in the middle of the comment counts as two characters for passing through the filter, even though the software then trims out the extra space before the comment is posted.

apologies for filling up your comment feed with mostly spurious comments, but that’s sometimes the nature of experimenting – you get spurious results. 😀

one way to post very short answers, ie a single smiley or one-word replies such as ramen! is to make them into links or add bold and/or italic and/or underline and/or [fill in the blank with your favorite] html tags.