Comments are back — thanks for your patience

January 2, 2008 12:11 pm
|    Comments Off on Comments are back — thanks for your patience
 |   West Seattle online

And thanks again to our fabulous tech consultant Stuart Maxwell for troubleshooting: Long story short, because it includes some behind-the-curtain stuff you should know — The world of “spam” online doesn’t just affect your inbox; it also affects websites like ours that accept comments. Automated programs are out there relentlessly patrolling for places to try to post fake comments with addresses for porn sites, pharma sites, things like that. There’s an excellent spam-fighting program called Akismet that we and many other sites use, and it catches literally thousands of spam comments per day, on WSB alone. (Sometimes it accidentally nets bonafide comments too, so if a comment you post never turns up, that may be what happened.) According to what Stuart found out, Akismet had a glitch very early this morning, so the spam comments were flooding in, and the site-hosting company disabled the function till the problem could be solved. All’s well now, the old comments are back, and you can post new ones too. Sorry for the snag!

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