The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

As the post below suggests, we're back, with many thanks to Rory for helping get to the bottom of the Wombat's mysterious ailment; turns out that all the comment spam that has been hitting the site over the past year was only being partially dealt with by the MT-Blacklist plugin; that is to say, even "deleted" or disallowed comments were still being saved in an ever-growing file on my server space. Little did I realize that it was rapidly growing to eclipse my own meager contributions.

The Speedy Hand of the Snail made fast work of all that garbage, returning our glorious history of trivial nattering -- that is to say, your many erudite contributions to our weekly Quizzes -- to a state unsullied by the many dirty-minded and poker-obsessed comment-bots which had made each entry a minefield of greymarket commerce and your editor one sorely tried marsupial.

Now, however, the question must be faced: what defense have we against this merciless onslaught? I inform you with both hope and a twinge of anxiety that in the Brave New World of the Wombat File, commenting lives on, but with a price in the form of momentary inconvenience: you must sign on (at no monetary cost, I hasten to assure you), to Six Apart's impressive TypeKey service, in order to leave a comment on the 'File.

The very good news is that this is a fairly easy service to use, and (as mentioned before) free, and what's more, your registration works for any site using TypeKey -- so if you've already run into this issue somewheres else, and created a TypeKey account, simply use it here. (More on using TypeKey here).

Let me know if you have any problems -- and yes, the Quiz will return to its usual time and place, starting tomorrow.

**UPDATE-- hmm...TypeKey sign in is not yet working right. I may not have given the system the information it needs. We'll try to get this fixt in time for the quiz.**

The problem with Typekey appears to be fixed. I do need to apply styles to those comment pages, though...