Happy Earth Day!
Couple of things this morning. First, if you live in the States, please take a few moments to email or call your congressmen to vote NO on CISPA. The internet is positively rotten with arguments for and against this amendment to 1947’s National Security Act. If you don’t understand why it’s such a big deal — and if you value what’s left of your privacy — make the research a priority.
I would have joined in all the fun and blacked out the site today, but then I remembered how much of an attention span I have for site stuff. Having the site blocked out for a week might inconvenience readers just a bit.
And speaking of massive inconvenience, today’s second news item concerns the forum. I love the new forums. So do the spam bots. I swear to you, behind the scenes it’s been like Battlestar Gallactica trying to figure out which of the hundreds of members awaiting activation are real, and which are bots. (You should have seen the day one of them got mad about getting banned a bunch of times and scripted us 22 pages of pharmaceutical ads. I had to kill an entire board. That was not awesome.)
But after a lot of Googling and tweaks to the settings, I might finally have those $$%&*#s held at bay. Upon registering, new members will have to do captcha and answer some really easy “are you human” questions. Same for a new member’s first post, but once those hoops are out of the way, you’ll never have to do it again.
I do apologize for the extra steps, but it beats doing away with the forums entirely.