SPAM is Creepy

We are inclined to keep this blog as accessible as possible for those who want to read and comment here. Our comments have been left as open as possible, and we generally do not moderate that function of this Blog.

However, in the last couple of months, we've begun to attract that particularly obnoxious variety of spammer that markets pharmaceuticals to improve "performance" and shady offshore financial deals and computer software of some sort of indecipherable nature. It started slowly at first, and oddly, seemed to only happen at one older post written in May of 2008. Honestly, we'd have never even seen these things if it weren't that Master gets all of the comments left here in His email. Generally, if one comes through on some older post, He will forward it to me, knowing that I won't see it otherwise. I didn't worry too much about it in the beginning -- precisely because of WHERE the comments were being left; way back there in the realm of blogging ancient history.

However, as it has gone on, it has started to bother me. It may be "ancient history" in the blogging world, but it is MY ancient history, and this post, like most of the rest of the content here, means something to me. When it got to the point that eleven of the fourteen comments were spam, I hit the creepiness limit.

So, this morning, I've gone in and cleaned out all of that junk, and I am reinstating the CAPTCHA feature on comments, and instituting comment moderation on posts older than 14 days. I dislike having to put people through that, but I am feeling compelled to utilize the available tools in order to protect the integrity of our comment streams. I do apologize for the inconvenience, but hope that our regular readers and commenters will understand.

swan