If you aren’t a big YouTube (News - Alert) user — in which case, I assume you aren’t reading this as you probably don’t use the Internet altogether — you may not have noticed that something has changed on the site recently. Specifically, the comments system should looks a little different. Now, if you’re the type to avoid YouTube comments altogether, that’s understandable. You should be pleased to learn, then, that YouTube’s new comment section has fixed all the spam, off-the-cuff remarks and nonsense. Oh, wait it’s actually somehow worse.

According to independent computer security analyst Graham Cluley over on his blog, the new Google+ commenting system that was rolled out to YouTube users in the first week of November has made it much easier for spammers to, well, spam. While the old comment system automatically filtered out links and allowed users to report spam-y comments, the new Google (News - Alert)+ system allows links, while putting spam filtering more in the hands of individual channels.

As you might imagine, the result of allowing people to share links on one of the most-used websites in the world has led to a lot of scamming, spamming and plain old linking to inappropriate content.

Then there’s the ASCII art; you may have seen it. The most prominent one is a picture of a tank accompanied by the line “Bob is building an army” that claims to be in protest of the new comment system. This is more annoying than anything, though.

The scamming, on the other hand, is a legitimate problem. Part of the aim of integrating Google+ with YouTube, according to Google, is that people might be less likely to post idiotic comments since their real name and — in some cases — face is visible to the public. However, this also means that if a scammer manages to hijack someone’s account, they can go about using that person’s real name to further spread their spam.

Fortunately, Google has acknowledged the situation and is promising to fix it. In particular, it plans to introduce better recognition of bad links, impersonation attempts and ASCII art going forward, as well as tweaking how long comments are displayed. The good news is, this means YouTube comments will soon be back to normal. The bad news is, “back to normal” is still not great but, hey, it’s an improvement.