Somervell County Salon has been getting a huge amount of spam lately.I read something recently that said the number of spambots on the planet now outnumbers real people. 

I'm a little tired of fighting it this week, so am going to run an experiment. For the next while, to read the posts and comment, you will need to be registered and logged on. I hope to clear out spammers who use the registration system as a way to hawk baloney URLs. 

On the plus side, going to see if this also promotes more active participation. Somervell County Salon gets a lot of people from all over the place that regularly read this blog. Will see if being registered leads to more participation. 

Hah! Quick experiment. Changed my mind. Spam is just a fact of life, unfortunately.

Read this about Instagram deleting fake accounts and angering their followers.

A crackdown on spam Instagram accounts has triggered a cataclysm in the world of low-grade social media celebrities. The event, which began today after the photo-sharing service made good on its promise to start deleting millions of fake accounts, has been dubbed the "Instagram Rapture" after the follower counts of apparently popular Instagrammers were savaged. Rapper Tyga saw his followers drop from 5.5 million to 2.2 million, while Ma$e committed Instagram's version of seppuku, deleting his account after freefalling from 1.6 million followers to around 100,000.

Some users have revelled in the spam massacre, suggesting that those who have seen the biggest drops are guilty of having purchased fake followers to boost their numbers, while others have railed against the crackdown, begging Instagram to bring the spam accounts back to reinflate their follower counts. Instagram told Business Insider that the users it was removing were either already deactivated spam accounts, or violated the service's guidelines.