Some of our more prolific commentators might note that some of their posts are being incorrectly identified as spam. This often happens if you post too many links, if your comment is too long, or if you use certain key phrases.

In the continual pursuit of making your Being Frank experience a good one, we have implemented a new, upgraded spam detection engine. This should solve many of the problems we have had with false-positives, but please bear with us as we break it in – there may be some teething problems. If you have any issues, please comment against this post and we will try and rectify the situation.

Also, to those who have asked for promotional material for Being Frank, rest assured things are in the works. We are looking at releasing some other enhancements to the user interface at the same time so stay tuned!

UPDATE: The filter thought it was smarter than it actually is.  :)  When it identifies someone as a spammer, it retrospectively “spanks” (their terminology, not ours) all their comments for the past 15 days!  We have recovered all the comments that were marked by this algorithm, and have disabled that particular piece of functionality.  This is part of the teething problems we were referring to above.  It will take a little while to “train” the new filter that quotes from the Catechism are not the same as links to Viagra sites.  :)  In the meantime, if you find your comment has been marked as spam, please don’t repost it with a word changed or some dots at the end – all this will do is get the filter to mark you as a bigger spammer.  We will be monitoring the filter actively over the next week, and will rectify spam comments as soon as we see them.  If you haven’t had your comment restored after a couple of hours, please post a comment against this post and we’ll get right on to it.  This is especially relevant to our more prolific commentators.  :)

NOTE: For those who are wondering if this is all a lot of fuss for no reason, we are currently catching roughly 400-500 spam comments…per day!  Some of them are absolutely disgusting, and it is a continual arms race to try and keep them off the site without having to resort to comment moderation.  Please, please bear with us.

We just wanted to thank everyone who nominated Being Frank for the Catholic Blog Awards. The nominations were accepted and you can now vote for us (if you like) at www.catholicblogawards.com.  It only takes a couple of minutes to register and we’d appreciate the support.

And thanks to all of you who keep checking back in to the site – whether you take part in the (sometimes heated) discussions or not.  ;)  It means a lot to the team to know that there is a community growing here and that our thoughts are worth some of your time.

God bless,

The Being Frank Team

Hi everyone,

Now that the blog has been up and running for a couple of weeks, we’re starting to see what about the layout works and what doesn’t.  So, over the next few days/weeks, we’ll be tweaking the blog to make the user experience a more enjoyable one.  We’d appreciate your ideas and feedback – feel free to note them as comments against this post – as to how we can make this blog even better.

Also, feel free to spread the news of this blog to your friends and family and get them checking out and taking part in the conversations that are happening here at Being Frank.

Thanks for reading,

The Being Frank team