So, regular visitors may have noticed some strange error messages last week. Those should be gone for now. I was spammed so hard that the database which runs this blog broke, rather severely. I've managed to recover almost all the data to a new database, but the comments table was completely trashed. This means that old comments have been relegated to the status of "ghosts", and will vanish in the event old pages ever get updated.

How do other bloggers deal with spam? I've got spam filters, but those don't really help: a million spam comments an hour pouring into the Junk folder breaks the DB just as bad as a million a day going to the page -- and it's not just the spam being received that causes the problem: just by the act of hammering the server with their spam, they suck up my bandwidth -- and I do mean suck.

Anyway, I've got some redirects in place now to divert suspicious activity away from the comments pages. It's possible that you might accidentally fall into one -- make sure you never navigate your way to a page called spider-trap, as you'll fall permanently into my list of banned IPs.