Spam Begone

A couple of years ago, while visiting the in-laws in southern Minnesota, my wife, Mistress of All Things Kitschy (hey, she’s still married to me, isn’t she?) decided to take the whole family to the Spam Museum in Austin, MN.

It was interesting, to say the least. I learned more about the ingredients of Spam and its historical impact than I ever–really, ever–thought I would.

While I have a soft spot in my heart (or, rather, somewhere in my gastrointestinal tract) for Spam, the presence of spam, the opportunistic electronic kind, makes me crazed.

So it was with dismay that we watched our open-to-the-community blog system get flooded with spam soon after launch. So much so, that I was required to make a distasteful decision: implement moderation so nothing would be posted without me approving it. A stop gap measure, but one that went against the very goals of  Linux.com: open community expression.

Luckily, we have a really great team of developers, who have been working diligently to set up a system that will allow us to open the blog system back up again. I am pleased to tell you that the system is in place starting this evening.

Under each blog entry, there is a new Report Spam link. If you see spam appear on the site, click on the link. After a small number of fellow users report the same entry as spam, the offending entry will be removed and the user blocked from the site to prevent further spamming. In addition, we’ve asked some Linux.com members who were very helpful in fighting the initial deluge to be moderators that can immediately remove spam on their own.

I want to thank everyone for their patience and helpful suggestions when we were getting hammered, and their understanding after I started gatekeeping posts.

The blog system is open once again, ideally spam-free! Go forth and expound on our favorite operating system.