Over the last week or two the site has been hammered by blogspam, and the Spam Filter has been pretty good about blocking it. Unfortunately, it has also occasionally decided that a few of you legitimate commenters are spambots as well... even one or two of you who are posting from registered accounts.

Drupal comes with two default types of users: Anonymous Users, who don't have an account on the site, and Authorized Users, who have created a an account and post/browse from it. I have now added a third account: "Verified Users." It is identical in every way to Authorized Users, except that it has been given the additional privilege of being able to completely bypass the spam filters. Those of you being tagged by the anti-spam module in Drupal who have an account will be able to be upgraded to Verified user status and (hopefully) avoid the problem in the future.

The first person to be raised to Verified User status is the long-suffering David Nale, who has been tagged as spam (with a 99% probability, according to the spam logs) so consistently that I almost considered naming the new user status a "Nale Account" in his honor.

If it works for him I'll start updating Authorized Users to Verified User status when I notice them running afoul of the spam module...