Just wanted to once again address the attacks of spam that have been hitting Cafe unfortunately hard over the weekends.

As we've all witnessed, the spam problems get especially bad on Saturday and Sunday, when there's no one officially policing the system - we understand that people are miffed, and we're looking at a few possibilities to recruit readers to help us (as some of you have already volunteered to do), but the current software isn't really set up for it.

What we're doing is looking at a broader solution to solve the problems at Cafe. Nothing is set in stone yet, but I just wanted to acknowledge that we hear you, we see what's going on, we want to keep you happy here, and I promise that we're working on it.

We've shut off automatic registrations quite a few times in the past couple of months in order to fight the spam; this seems to work as a temporary solution, even though it's not ideal, as new TPM readers then have to wait for a staffer/intern to be available and reply to their manual account registration requests. We've also discussed altering the system so that new users can only start blogging after having their account and commenting for a week, like at DailyKos or Fark.

Until we find the best solution, your best bet is to flag spam as abuse and email me directly (versha @ talkingpointsmemo . com) whenever you see something fishy. Please include links in your email when possible.

And be on the lookout for this new form of spam that appeared here over the weekend - new users copying and pasting AP articles (or poetry, etc.) wholesale from other sources with no attribution or formatting, etc. Not every one of those posts is necessarily spam, but it's certainly okay to flag it. The sneaky new spammers seem to have devised a system wherein they're hiding tons of links within the posts in order to try and fool Google and up their pageranks - h/t to the genius Al for figuring it out and showing it to me. See below.

Seemingly normal (if randomly creative) post:

This is what the page source looks like, with all the hidden links:

Don't worry, you can't accidentally click on it and get malware or anything - but it's still annoying. So flag it and email me!

Thanks, as always, for your patience.