Some of you might have noticed this spam posted on all the boards before I deleted it. Actually, some of you did, because you posted comments about it. I had to delete your comments in the course of deleting the spam, but I saved one and couldn't forget a memorable one.

Nick wrote:

I realise that the number of spammers and idiots out there is literally uncountable, and they will keep finding new ways to post crap like this.

Is there an automatic way to screen out posts based on obviously offensive keywords (not just one or two in a pithy climax to a heated message, but a case of expletive density like this)?

Of course, we can probably rely on our hard-working moderators to manually clean things out, but the trend with the internet is always that as soon as something annoying happens, it gets picked up by gazillions of wannabes and becomes a ferocious swarm, rather than a single buzzing irritation.

The system has a built-in anti-spam feature that some of you have inadvertantly triggered when using software firewalls. The software won't accept postings that didn't come from its own message form. The obvious conclusion is that whoever did it went to the trouble of manually posting it.

I don't have any faith in automated censorware. For one thing it lacks human judgment. How do you distinguish the expletive density of a spam from the style of EP Grondine, for example? Another problem is that it's too easy to fool automated censorware with simple tricks like character substitution: "@ssh0le" wouldn't be caught without a hugely complex filter that tries all possible substitutions.

I think that the first-line anti-spam filter is pretty effective, backed up by manual deletion when somebody is so determined to spam as to do it by hand. If the volume of spam rises, I think a better solution is to go to a membership model, rather than to try censorware.

Sucess_machine posited that you could defeat a "spam bot" by reversing the positions of the Post and Clear buttons. I had this vision of an actual robot sitting in front of a computer display, looking at it and manipulating the mouse to click the button at a memorized position. Uh...well...ahem...ummmm....colorful idea, but probably not the way it's done in practice.