My comments are marked as “spam” wherever I post them from (work, library, home) so I don’t think it’s a matter of IP addresses.

I am using IE6. I have tried with a dummy name, e-mail and URL but nothing changed.

So for the time being I “only” have to wait for you to let my comments through. A bit of a pain for us both.

Is there a way you can whitelist “me”?

You have my private e-mail address, from the comments and from our exchange about National Geographic some time ago

Tried to post on the Faith as Small… thread

“It’s interesting that this came up again just now.

As it happens, I saw nine real angels yesterday at my Aunt Helen’s funeral, come to carry her to her final rest, and they had nothing to do with visions, or invisible people, or pareidolia.

They were United States Marines.”

As I have been consistently getting, I got:

“Sorry, but your comment has been flagged by the spam filter running on this blog: this might be an error, in which case all apologies. Your comment will be presented to the blog admin who will be able to restore it immediately.
You may want to contact the blog admin via e-mail to notify him.”

Running a Windows machine, Firefox 2.004, Adblock Plus 0.7.5.1, United States English Dictionary 2.0.0.6.

Just had a thought and tried IE7, samey same, so it doesn’t look like it’s my browser, specifically.

I started having problems a while back when I got blacklisted for a spam worm I had been infected with, and I was getting redirected to an informational page about that, with two links to two different black lists. Following the links, one of them took me to a page that showed the last time the outgoing spam was detected from my IP address.

Once I got the worm gone, I commented daily knowing I’d be re-directed, just so I could check that page for a week or two before requesting de-listing, just to avoid being re-listed. I was all good and about to make that request when you revamped the site.

Right about that time, my ISP changed my IP address, and the above is the message I get now, with no links to the blacklists.

It’s plain black text on a plain white page, and the url bar shows this:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/wp-comments-post.php

If this had been an actual comment, you’d be hot and bothered right now.

I have even blanked out the field with my website in it.

Still, I seem to recall from a few years ago some prominent person (a judge?) declaring in the media, “What we need is a few public hangings [of spammers]“.

I have an idea for the blind people though: use image tags on the CAPTCHA image to ask a question, and allow the user to submit either answer. Then ask fairly easy questions like “What office does President Bush hold?” or “What planet does the Moon orbit?” I’d think anyone smart enough to be blind and still surf the internet could answer the question, but computers would have a hard time answering them.