A few days ago, we implemented a major change to World of Meh.  We had originally enforced registration for commenting because of the deluge of spam we knew we would receive if we took no proactive action.  Being lazy people, we decided to enforce registration so that we wouldn’t have to combat spam.  Unfortunately, we failed to take into consideration the laziness of the Internet at large, and our comment numbers suffered for it (no offense, you lazy bastards).  We did keep an approval system in place, so that these spam comments wouldn’t overflow onto the articles.  Hopefully the approval lag isn’t a bother for any of you.

In the last three days, we have received almost 100 spam comments.  We realize that this may not seem like a great deal now, but this will increase dramatically as the site grows, which would lead to longer wait times for legitimate comment approval.  We want to avoid this.  We do not want to reinstate the registration policy, but we do want to do something slightly more proactive than a simple approval system.  Noticing that many of today’s junk comments originated from the same IP address, I decided to implement an IP ban policy.  If a comment appears to be spam, that IP gets a visit from our newest staff member:

Call me Hammer. Ban Hammer. Can't spam this.

From now on, all banned IP addresses will be greeted with this page.  Hopefully this additional measure will help maintain a streamlined World of Meh experience for all of our readers.

-[insert OH SNAP here]