Comments

A little blog housekeeping is in order here.

Several days ago, the overlords at SEED Magazine installed a new spam filter, which, despite some fine-tuning over the last several days, unfortunately still seems a bit more indiscriminate than we'd like, sometimes gobbling up legitimate comments without our being able to figure out what words are triggering the filter. On the internal discussion forums, some of us, such as Ed Brayton, have been scratching our heads over what triggered the spam filter on some comments. Worse, because this filter works before Moveable Type ever sees the comment, unlike the case before (where such comments would show up in a "Junk" folder from which I could retrieve and publish them), I am now completely unaware when this new spam filter slaps down a post.

So, dear readers, if you have tried to comment and it hasn't shown up in several hours (the other spam filters can still hold up some comments that contain too many links or other features for moderation), drop me an e-mail. Better yet, if you still have the comment, send it to me, and I'll forward it to the techies, so that they can try to figure out what the problem was. And try to be patient with us. Remember that the real enemy is the spammers. If they weren't constantly trying to deluge our comments here with spam, then there'd be no need for all the countermeasures out techies are working on finetuning.