The scourge of the Internet has finally caught up with us. The biggest nuisance of a growing website is spam. We've been getting away with having a simple registration system for some time, but no more. No doubt some of you have noticed (and have been annoyed by) the growing number of comments over the past few weeks that have been promoting some or other online store. What's worse, because we have this nice email alert system for comments, these comments have also ended up in your inbox.

Cartoon by Vladimir Kazanevsky

We apologize for this, and want to inform everyone that we are taking steps to prevent spam, which we hope to implement in the next two weeks. The most important measure will be to include email verification in the registration process. For already registered users, nothing will change.