For some people, I won’t need to point these issues out. They already know where it is and they’ve been shouting about it. I hear you.

Increase in spam

We’re seeing an increase in a couple different types of spam lately. Sometimes it’s your straightforward, anonymous spammers. We can catch that easily. Recently, Disqus users have been victims to blackhat spammers who spend some time to leave legitimate comments, only to sign off with a suspicious link hawking designer sunglasses. We’ve gone through a handful of different spam handlers. We’re not entirely happy with what we have going on right now.

And last week, our spam handling went down for a short while which created a large backlog of unprocessed spam comments. This didn’t help things at all.

But, there is a solution. We’ve been working on our own Disqus anti-spam that we will be launching soon. It’s too early to report on its total effectiveness, but tests are looking very good.

Database issues

The last two days, our main database server hasn’t been up to snuff. We’ve been doing a lot of patching and fixing along the way, but there is a more permanent solution that we’re still scrambling to finish. Disqus needs to be reliable at all times, and sudden outage spurts aren’t acceptable.