The level of spam forced onto the SoC page was actually rather impressive. I didn't think the spammers had it in them to utterly drive me crazy. At first I started by simply banning outright their phrases, and enabling the proxy check thing. Then I got really tough, and forced all comments to be approved before being posted.

When all that failed, I tried some random add-on solutions to prevent the spam. No go. I still logged on to see 10-15 "approve me!" spams in my inbox every day. So, now, thanks to the wonderful technology in the hands of spammers worldwide, you can't tell the (obviously slacking, the last post was almost a week ago!) students how much you love their hard work.

Also hi. I'm Zac West. You probably don't know me, but I'm the guy who coded the Xtras webpage, and ends up doing most of the web work around here. Nice to meet you. ;-)

Edit: Okay, I've set up that Akismet plugin. Let's hope it's up to par with what you guys have said and can keep out the huge amount of spam.

Also, for the record, I utterly hate CAPTCHA systems. I can't stand them. Half the time, I myself end up entering the image wrong because of horrible overlays and I get tossed a fatal error that prevents me from then even using the website I'm trying to enter. Usually their images are so easy to process that it's just a joke that makes them think they have some form of security. I mean, "ASDF" in a straight line, in the same font, on a monotone background (or with minor defective filtering) is hardly a huge security force.