ADMIN: Spam rampant

Just a reminder that we’ve got a spamtrap in effect because we receive literally hundreds of spam comments per day. They range from the generic (umpteen zillion ways to say, “Your blog is awesome! I totally agree with everything you have to say. You are such a good writer to know how to make your points so clearly!”) to the strange (the person who claimed to be held prisoner by the Irish mafia who were making him post spam for a Christmas website) to just plain garbage.

Sometimes our spamtrap has been known to get a little overzealous and swallow legitimate comments (due to some arcane combination of keywords or alignment of stars or something), but we check the spamtrap several times per day. As long as we don’t get deluged again we should be all right to find false positives sooner or later. (Unfortunately, they will usually get posted in the order in which they were received, which means if we’ve received a lot of comments since then they might not show up in the “Newest comments” bar—I’ve asked about it but there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about that.)

If you post a message and it seems to disappear, please don’t try to post it again—if the first posting of it vanished, odds are the second one will as well, and we’ll just end up with multiple copies of that post in the spamtrap. If you’re really concerned, contact us by e-mail or twitter and we’ll look as soon as we can (though it may not be much sooner than we would have been able to otherwise—I work 8 hours a day, for instance).

Thanks for your patience.