If you posted a comment between midnight and 8 a.m. ...

When I started the site, anybody could post a comment and it would go up immediately. Then I started getting hit by spam, lots of spam, so I went to captcha. The spammers took one look, snorted, broke the various captchas I tried and went on spamming. So I went to a moderation queue (i.e., I had to manually approve all comments). That cut out most of the public spam, but left me waking up every morning to scores, sometimes hundreds of automated spam comments. Turns out there are some ways to have the system auto-recognize spam, and so far they're working - the only spam attempts I see these days are from spammers who employ actual human beings to find systems and try to post comments.

But as the spam decreased, the number of racist crap or just crap in general started going up. Huzzah! UHub has made it and is popular and people who get bored posting on newspaper sites have found their way here, and some of them keep posting the same sort of thing with the same sort of comments (and even odd little syntactical stylings so I can tell when a particular person has left a comment) even though they should realize their comments are never going to go public. I guess they think I'm just sitting here crying and gnashing my teeth and banging my head against the table in sheer despair over the brilliance of their witty remarks and so it's worth it to keep spitting into the virtual wind here, when, in fact, I've just gotten old and cynical and cranky and go "Oh, him again! Say hello to my little friend, Mr. Delete Box."