In an attempt to fight the ever-growing amounts of spam on this blog (nearly hundred a week that I have to manually delete), I have made a change to the comments section.

I already have a conditional CAPTCHA appearing if a comment seems to be a spam message, and Akismet is checking my posts against their spam database, but the spam texts are increasingly “well-written” so that they are harder to distinguish from bona-fide comments. The actual spam URL is mostly no longer in the text body but in the commenter’s address field.

As of now, everyone who does not yet have an approved comment on one of my articles will end up in the moderation queue where I have to approve or reject the comment manually.

That will stop the spam messages from appearing on the blog and RSS feed, and once you have an approved post on my blog, your next posts will not have to be moderated.

My apologies if you want to comment here for the first time and your text does not appear immediately after hitting “Submit”. I think this is the best for the blog as well as its readers!

Eric