I’m getting overwhelmed by blog spam, so I’ve enabled the Akismet filter. The catch is that it gets some false positives. If your comment fails to appear, don’t take it personally — just e-mail me and I’ll rescue it from the bit bucket.
Sideblog
- Some nice pictures: Ghost signs of downtown (Via LoCoHistory) and Duncan Brown's 1980 photos of the Downtown Mall. #
- Charlottesville native Will Frischkorn, racing for Garmin-Chipotle, is kicking ass in this year's Tour de France. #
- The Hook calls the Progress on posting a conservative e-mail forward as a letter to the editor when the paper knew it was was plagiarized. Worse still, it's a terrible letter; why publish it at all? #
- DMB's LeRoi Moore is in the UVa hospital in "serious condition" after getting into an accident on his ATV on his farm. #
- Charlottesville resident Adam Nelson has qualified for the Olympics in the shot put. #
- Council is looking at blanketing downtown with WiFi. I'd go with a mesh network—it's cheaper, and my tests downtown show that it'll work just fine. #
- VDOT is reviewing the timing of lights on 29N. The bad news is that some of these jammed intersections are probably just getting more traffic than they can handle. #
- The Sheltons' apple orchard will begin producing hard cider, with the first batch expected to go on sale in the spring. Oh, hell yes. #
- Crime was down 3% in Albemarle and 7% in Charlottesville last year. Statewide the drop was 1%. #
- Courtesy of Google Books, "Rev. Edgar Woods' 1901 Albemarle County in Virginia" (PDF), his 412 page history of the county. I'm excited about reading this. #
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About
This is a community news blog about Charlottesville, VA, USA, started in March of 2001. It's run by Waldo Jaquith. It has nothing to do with C-Ville Weekly, the newspaper. Feel free to submit a story.
Yeah, I’ve seen a three-fold increase in the quantity of blogspam getting past *Akismet* in the last month or so. It has tapered off, presumably as Akismet adapts.
It has been paralleled by an increase in email spam that gets past Gmail.
I’m sorely tempted to just move to a knowledge CAPTCHA (is there a better term for it?), such as “The most famous president from Charlottesville is _______ Jefferson,” and have people fill in “Thomas.” On the one hand, it’d be annoying to do that with every post. On the other hand, it’s even more annoying for people having to wait hours or days for me to approve their comment.