Spam is an annoying thing. So are junk faxes. I get a bunch of both; in fact, even with my spam filter, I get about 50 (the filter takes out about 300, so it does help) every day. But what really has me riled is the message board that we've called the Aeropagas, on our website for Quartz Hill school of Theology.

Every day, I have to delete sometimes dozens of postings for viagra, pyramid schemes and even pornography. Hardly seems likely someone visiting a message board devoted to Missions or Christology would be interested in such things, but who knows? To me it seems a waste of the spammers time and effort and very ineffective marketing. I suspect these postings are machine generated and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it but delete the offensive posts. A couple of times it got so infested that a couple of the subtopics just crashed entirely and I had to restore them from backups. Ugh. Those responsible deserve a place in Dante's Inferno together with the spammers and those responsible for junk faxes. Whoever developed the packaging for DVDs, requiring removal of bunches of plastic wrap and tape should probably be interred there as well, but that's another topic...