Howdy all,
I’ve made some changes to the anti-spam configuration here in the forums. We has disabled Akismet for a while because it was producing too many false positives; ticking off legitimate users who were being held in moderation for as much as a few hours until we could get them published. But, the amount of spam we’ve been getting since then has been untenable. So, we’re back to Akismet being enabled, and a few other filtering mechanisms; you may find it takes a little longer to post a message if anything about it is fishy (if your IP has ever been used for spam, if your email address is associated with spam, or if your message contains spammy text), even if it doesn’t queue it for moderation.
I don’t want to re-enable CAPTCHA for posting to the forums, but may have to, if we don’t see a reduction in spam from this change.
Anyway, this hopefully won’t impact legitimate users too much, but if your message to the forums gets queued for moderation, don’t panic! We’ll get it approved as quickly as possible. We aren’t singling you out, or trying to dissuade you from asking questions or contributing. We just need to get spam under control, and increasing false positives by some amount seems to be an unwanted but necessary side effect of that.
As always, thanks for your patience while we deal with all the nonsense that goes with running a relatively popular website.
Cheers,
Joe