Hello everyone,

Now that the deluge of “kitchen cabinet” related spam has been dealt with, I felt it necessary to update you all as to goings-on here at Knots.

The move to our current forum platform, powered by Drupal, has–as we all know–been a difficult one. Despite experiments with CAPTCHA as well as other anti-spam modules, the attacks have caused me to feel as though Interpol ought to start treating spammers as felons. No, I’m not joking.

That said, here is the current status of the forum:

1) All that spam has been unpublished and reported to Mollum, our anti-spam module.

2) Currently, we’re working at blocking all posters of the offending spam from posting to Knots.

3) I’ll be opening the forum back up to comments shortly

Next Steps Regarding Moderation

Now, here’s the good news. Again, as most of you know, the fww.com staff is lucky if we’re able to check in here at Knots once a week. This is quite simply due to the volume of video, blogs, online articles, etc, that we are charged with creating. We are a very small team. Because of this, and because of the need to monitor for spam and the ocassional bit of nasty behavior between posters, we’re in the process of bringing in a third party moderator who can keep an eye on things and nip them in the bud the moment they surface. In fact, we might just have someone already (fingers crossed). I’ll keep you all posted on this as we move forward.

This has been a difficult week – especially due to the fact that we are currently gearing up for our second annual “live” event – Fine Woodworking Live – in New Haven, CT. But finally, early this morning, I swept away the last of the spam. My apolgies to you all for these spam attacks. Like I said, if I were, say, the Secretary-General of the UN, I’d most likely make it an international felony, track these cats down, and deport them straight to the Hague for prosecution and life terms in prison. Again, I am not joking. Does anyone have a direct line to Ban Ki-moon?

My best to you all,

-Ed