The site was down earlier due to a denial of service attack. It appears it have stopped for now. During the DoS attack, we noticed an automated intruder attempting to spam the site.
In order to pre-emptively mitigate any damages, we have added a captcha system to every post and comment. They are easy to fill out, we think. 
If you have any comments or feedback for the changes, please click on the ‘feedback’ tab on fearlessblogging.com and leave us a message.
Noticed that some posts have had people’s fullnames in them.
Bad, don’t do that.
Abbreviate, initials, whatever.
As the attacks of Anonymous heat up against Scientology (see ‘Why We Protest‘ for more information), it’s no surprise they’ve begun to spread the message everywhere.
For the past few days the site has been inundated with Scientology posts. Rather than remove them, I’ve flipped a switch that keeps them from showing up in the ‘Recent Entries’ list. If you were curious about them or wanted to read them, they’re still available if you do a search for ’scientology’ or look into the categories view.
That is all.
For the extremely lazy (me, and possibly you) I’ve created an web feed that aggregates the last 30 actions on the site (basically, posts and comments) and rolled them together.
Subscribe to http://fearlessblogging.com/activity/site in your favorite reader to see it in action.
Been mulling in my head what kind of new features to add to the site.
Some pretty good ones were emailed to me recently:
I don’t know if these will be implemented or not, but they are being considered.
suggest@fearlessblogging.com or just leave a comment here if you want to contribute.
There was a glitch in the spam filter a few days ago that “ate” some posts and comments without alerting me to the fact they were spam.
And by “some” I mean 32 posts and comments. Guess that explains why the site suddenly seemed empty.
I’ve disabled the spam filter for now and will just be pulling out the spam by hand now.
Just for fun, here are some of the posts you guys probably missed:
I’ve added a new feature to FearlessBlogging: identicon avatars.
(example)
What are they?
In short, when you make a new post or comment, you’ll be assigned a randomly generated avatar. You’ll be able to recognize the original post author and various commenters by these avatars. You’ll get a unique one for each blog post, so don’t worry about people being able to link you as the author of two separate blog posts. The way they’re created ensures your anonymity.
A couple of people pinged me after I said I wouldn’t bother going after the spammers in question, so let me clear it up here:
12 year olds.
Or, theoretically, anyone between the age of 12-15.
Normally the procedure is to bounce off an email to abuse@spammers-isp.com with some detailed information and they’ll handle the case from here. If, by the way, you haven’t tried this with spammers attacking your site, I would definitely recommend — ISP administrators tend to take them down pretty quickly. Anyway, as I was preparing the details I noticed a trend in the data — then it went “!” and I realized that the spammers were 12-15 year olds attacking on the site before they went to school, and, apparently, from their school’s computer lab.
Now, I got no love for spammers, but I’d hate to inadvertently cause some collateral damage and take their parents down with them. Typically an ISP won’t let you re-sign up for an account once they drop you — most spammers have deep connections, so they either “buy” a new address or bribe local isps, but since these are pretty young, pretty stupid people we’re dealing with her, the end result would be their parental units lacking the internet for a few days, to a few months. I know how hard it can be dealing with snot-nosed brats. 
Right now I’m mulling over if I should just ping their ISP and ask them to “pass the message along” or if I should just fire off the email myself.
In related news, the spam filter is working well — I’ve relaxed the limits for the regular users, so occasionally one of their posts slip through.
Spam’s gotten a little out of hand lately. I’ve implemented Defensio, which so far has done a good job at keeping the storm in its teacup.
Defensio is a bit aggressive, but as the filter learns what’s acceptable and what’s not it should calm down a bit and start letting more valid posts through.
Until then, expect post delays of a few minutes (or possibly hours, if you post at some crazy time like 6AM in the morning).