The first change we’re incorporating is the incorporation of some tougher anti-spam software.
Our previous anti-spam software filtered out comment spammers (for the most part) and kept them from being seen. We could go through the comments that were filtered out, and check them for non-spam that got misidentified, and fish them out to go back into the population of visible comments. That was good. Ish.
Unfortunately, that still meant that comment spammers could make spam comments. We had lots and lots and lots of these, and the bad news was that each time a spammer posted a bogus comment, a little bit of computer time was taken up on our server. As the assaults by comment spammers increased, we increasingly had our website overloading the server computers. You may have noticed that happened this afternoon.
We’ve been notified we must, must, must fix this — or lose our web hosting privileges. We don’t want the latter. As a result, we’ve installed additional new software that will work with the old software. This new software is designed to keep spammers even from being able to post bogus messages in the first place. They’ll be just bounced away. This is supposed to save CPU time, keeping us from getting shut down for being so popular with the spammers.
I write “supposed.” We are only doing this because we really have to. What if someone who is legitimately posting ends up getting bounced from the website, unable to post comments? This would be undesirable, and we do not know for absolutely sure that this will not happen. Yet we must, must, must add this feature to remain on the ‘net.
So We Need Your Help. If you end up having your comments being bounced from the site (which will happen with a little message that says something like, “Gotcha, you nasty Spammer!”), please, please, please:
1. Know that it is unintentional and not intended censorship.
2. Let us know by writing a message to retorts AT…
We are hopeful that this kind of botch-up will not happen. But you never know when you add a hard-ass piece of software, and we want to be sure that we get it right.
Yes, there are more changes coming up — bigger ones, too. You may start noticing them tonight, and we’ll talk about them, too.
