I know that people have been having some problems leaving comments here the last few days - I've had some myself; it's rather disconcerting to find that comments you're making to your own blog are being treated like radioactive spam. But I think the issue has been resolved, so if anything else odd happens, please let me know.

If you don't blog yourself, you'd probably be amazed at the volume of comment spam that comes in. Well, if your e-mail address is out on a web page like mine, maybe you wouldn't, considering what that does to your inbox. I pull two or three hundred offers of winning lotteries, African fortunes, dubious business propositions, and outright gibberish per day into my address. But there's a nearly equal volume of comment spam, which was always seemed to me one of the most pathetic attempts at advertising I've ever seen. Why bother? Well, because it's basically free, and hey, one out of every ten million people might click by accident. . .

There are keyword and lookup filters behind the scenes here that do an excellent job of catching all this garbage. Before they were implemented, I'd come in to take a look at the site in the morning and find the last fifty comments were a repeated offer to do things with farm animals or something, which was a welcome way to start the day, naturally. But if the setting get a little too aggressive, actual comments start getting flung into the bit-bucket. Every day or so I take a look at the pile and rescue a few strays, but we'll see how things look under the current settings.