What to do?

There are two things preventing me from getting this site back on its feet.

The first, perversely, is the existing content. So much of it is out of date and/or embarrassing it's, well, embarrassing. It's easier to pretend it doesn't exist than to try to sift through and streamline it. But it does exist. I still advertise it in my email and forum signatures. It's still standing up here on the web providing ever more new people with a window on my life as of, uh, three years ago. To begin to rework the content, I need to confront what's already here, which I'm fatally reluctant to do.

The second involves SPAM. Around 100 'comments' are left on this site every day. Typically, 99 of these are garbage - links to gambling sites, ads for replica Rolexes (Roleces?) and doomed attempts to send actual spam emails through my comments system. Back when the influx was a little gentler, I was manually deleting them as they appeared, but pretty soon I decided I didn't want them appearing on the site at all. So I made comments stay hidden by default until I 'approved' them. This worked for a while, but the signal to noise ratio soon decreased so far it became very time-consuming to identify the occasional genuine contribution. I stopped trying. This has meant that while the site appears peacefully dormant to the casual visitor, a cancer spreads behind the scenes, as I have a burgeoning database of junk and neither the time nor the inclination to act as a human spam filter on the whole lot.

So, if I can bring myself to hack a captcha into my comments system (remind me why I thought writing a blog/CMS from scratch was a good idea?) and to filter a five figure quantity of comments, then we're halfway there. Then I'll attack the rotting mass of Younger Paul's attempts at content. Should I come out the other side with something that, at this point in time, I consider relevant, then great! Now, that's a lot of conditionals right there, and I know we've been down this road before. But since it's that time of year when I have lots of arguably more important things I should be doing, it just might happen :-)

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