Phew. Can we please get rid of that forced moderation for new members' posts?

[Clinton]

aren't spam posts pretty obvious.

You've got no idea!

The current system is a good system.

Thank you, Harry, that means a lot to me. I remember how much we discussed the spam problem and the should we/shouldn't we move to a new system and all the backups of "bad" email addresses and "bad" IPs we took and all the other stress we - mainly you - handled.

Everyone else, you'll just have to trust me on this, every single one of the current restrictions is there for a very good reason and has been put in place because we've figured out over the years many of the tricks spammers use. Most spammers are idiots and give themselves away easily. Others are a lot smarter, a lot more devious and sneak in promotion of their websites, or link drops, in very cunning ways - hidden text with links, white text, punctuation marks with links etc. are the EASY ones to spot!

I appreciate some restrictions imposed by what is, after all, an automated system can be frustrating but as the person who has first hand experience of the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of spam messages we've deleted, the thousands of suspect IPs we kept tracking, the thousands of hours Harry spent cleaning the site of spam, I'm very satisfied that we've got a good balance of minimum disruption to genuine users while keeping spam at bay so the site is clean for YOU to use (without having to trawl through a lot of junk to get at the information you need).

For every post you see in public there are more than a hundred (spam posts) that have been blocked by the system! Anyone who wants to volunteer to clean that spam manually is welcome to PM me with their proposal to lift any of the current restrictions.