Baked beans, spam spam and spam.

Hey all. My site has recently been inundated by endless spam messages. And by endless, I mean upwards of 5ooo messages a day. I have a personally crafted spam filter that grabbed lots of them, but recently I’ve been running into spam that has crept past that filter, and it’s been … annoying. Like, I’ve needed to devote hours to combing through the spam to see if there’s any real messages in there.

To deal with this, I’ve been tightening my filter. I just wanted to notify people, in case you write a message and it doesn’t actually post to the site. It doesn’t mean that I hate you, or that you posted something unacceptable. It just means that you used a word or phrase that triggered my increasingly touchy spam filter.

In particular, most of the spam coming my way now has to do with medicine and the medical community (specifically the obtaining of medicine through somewhat nefarious online means) and so my filter’s been set to boot almost all messages that refer to anything medicine-related. There may be some casualties due to this – real comments filtered out erroneously – but I had to err on the side of more filtering. Sorry.

It’s either apply a heavy filter or make everyone do one of those ‘I am not a robot’ tests every time they post, and that’s no fun for anyone.