Ken has graciously allowed me to butt in here to announce that the comments system will be undergoing some changes in order to foil spammers.
Right now, all comments made from an IP address for the first time are held in a queue, which I manually comb for spam and delete. After a comment from a certain IP address has been approved once, it is allowed through automatically. (This might explain why the first time you posted, nothing showed up right away, but now everything does.) The advantage of this system is that it’s 100% effective. The disadvantage (aside from requiring manual approval from me), is that as the number of new human posters has decreased, the number of would-be spammers has gone through the roof. In the early days of this year, I would have a dozen spam and six or seven real comments every morning. Now, the site receives only one new human commenter every few days, and approximately 1,500 spam comments every day.
While I don’t mind deleting the spam — it actually gives me a little thrill to personally squash those nefarious robots — I’m terrified that the amount of noise will cause me to not notice an actual reader’s comment, and thus accidentally banish them from any further posting. Therefore, I am going to experiment with a few different auto-screening programs that are 99% effective, but will require some little task (a math problem, a series of letters and numbers) from you to allow comments to post.
Not all of these programs will be friendly with the fancy AJAX in the site template. Please leave me feedback if you are having issues by e-mailing to my first name at my full name dot com (or, if possible, leave a comment on this post, or a note in the forum). The best case scenario will be a new system that works and doesn’t let spam through by this weekend.
Thanks for your patience. All hail Jabootu!
