OK, this week we are going to be looking at the Oyster Industry, and we start with this picture from about 1912. It shows a young man, Henry, who works shucking oysters. He works before school, after school, and on the weekend to try and help support his family. This week we will be looking at all types of great pictures of the Oyster business from around 1900.
Now, I am hearing the growing grumbling about the new, harder word verifications for comments. Let me explain the dilemma I face. This blog gets about 10,000 visitors a day. That is big enough that it is the target of a large number of automated spammers. Many of these spammers have large operations targeting blogs with computer generated comments. Many of these comments include links to porn sites, illegal download sites, and nefarious casino and gambling operations. If I allow comments without word verification, a number of these comments would end up polluting the comments section each day. So, we are faced with three choices, none of which are very good.
1) I turn off word verification, but manually review and approve each comment before it appears on the site. I would not be able to review comments during the day, so the blog would have no comments show up during the day, and then they would all show up in the evening when I got home to review and approve them. With this choice, any interaction between you all would be removed, and when you checked the blog during the day, you would not be able to enjoy each others comments.
2) I turn off word verification, and allow comments to be posted without review. Unfortunately, with this option during the day spam messages like the ones described above would show up. Yes, I could delete them in the evening, but they would be there throughout the day. My top priority here is to maintain a family friendly site, so I simply can not consider this choice as it would have inappropriate material show up in the comments during the day.
3) Choice three is the option we now have . . . comments appear without review, but word verification is required to post.
So, I wish I had a better solution but simply do not see it at this time.