We try very hard to not write about the nuts-and-bolts of running our little beer blog. You don’t care about that. You care about beer.* Frankly, so do we.

But, sometimes it can’t be avoided when it’s something with the potential to affect the communications between us.

If you’re a blogger, you know that comment spam is a huge problem. We use several tools to combat it: Akismet, Bad Behavior, and recently added a CAPTCHA. No comment spam published here.

However, when Aksimet flags a comment as spam, it is put in a holding area for a number of days. Of the thousands that it has captured for us so far, there have been two, or possibly three, false positives. As a result, I have been dutifully combing that holding area, looking for legitimate comments that shouldn’t have been flagged. And let me tell you, I have had my fill of spam about Tramadol, Viagra, Cialis, and some of the nastiest porn in the world. (I’m no prude, but some of the keywords trigger my gag reflex. I’ll spare you the details.)

I did this for you, because I didn’t want one of your genuine comments to get missed.

Well, I just can’t do it any more. The volume of it is just too great. I’d rather spend more time writing stuff than working on Hop Talk’s plumbing.

So, I’ll no longer be checking the Akismet spam trap for legitimate comments. Everything in there gets auto-deleted after about two weeks.

However, we don’t want to lose your words. If you’ve made a comment and it doesn’t appear within a day or so, drop us a line to let us know. We’ll search through the muck to find it.

Now, back to the topic at hand: beer.

* That’s not to imply that you don’t care about anything else, of course.