Busy Behind the Scenes

If you’ve followed this blog from the beginning, you probably noticed that posting activity dropped sharply following the death of Jerry Falwell. There were 36 posts in April 2007, 18 posts in May 2007, and only one post in June 2007.

The pace of posting has remained slow. The fifteen posts currently on the front page stretch back nearly three years.

Brainrow StatusBut it hasn’t been all idleness here at Brainrow Headquarters.

Even while few new posts have been made here, visitors have offered many, many comments on some of those posts. Sadly, a significant fraction of those comments appear to be not genuine reactions to posts or other comments, but rude attempts to leave commercial or malicious messages on this site. (Around this past Thanksgiving, there were probably about 3,000 such messages left here every day.)

Fortunately, software helps to identify those comments as suspicious before you see them. This has made it much easier for me to approve the 313 genuine comments we’ve seen here so far. The software also keeps track of the number of messages it has found suspicious, and that number helps me to imagine that this blog is a lot more popular than it actually is.

I also notice that this will be this blog’s lucky 1300th post.

They aren’t all gems.