For all those running a WordPress blog, please note - do not mark any spam comment as “spam” while moderation. Just delete it. If you don’t, it will just sit there in the wp_comments table. The performance of your WordPress installation will go down as the size of this table increases.

Why am I ranting about WordPress installation and size of a table instead of writing a post on Astrology? This is because of spam comments, which I realize are almost 80% of all the comments that I receive. I had to undertake a massive cleanup exercise and while I have taken all precautions, I am afraid I might have deleted some genuine comments. If it was one of yours, I apologize.

In the past one week, how many of you have seen the following error message on the blog?

I believe that things should be fine now, but if they are not, please let me know by dropping a line.

Over the weekend, I found out a way of inserting Hindi/Sanskrit words in the articles. I will publish the entire procedure of how to use windows live writer to blog in Hindi on my other blog on blogspot.

Here, I would like to begin with a shloka:

????? ?????? ?????? ????? ????? ???????? |
????? ??????? ???????? ?? ?????? ????????????? ||

This verse taken from Vrihadakaaranyaka Upanishad means - may all be happy, may all be without any diseases. May all see good in the world, may no one have any sorrows.

English would still be my primary language of publication. However, this method would allow me to represent some of words in Sanskrit/Hindi for which transliteration is extremely difficult.

I have been spending almost 20-30 minutes a day to clean out spam hitting the Astrology Notes section on this website. A little more and it would have qualified as vandalism.

What this means is that in the process of leaving a comment on this site, you, as a reader will have to take a test called captcha to prove that you are not a robot. Please don’t worry, this is not a difficult test . It involves filling out one more field after filling out the comment, which is a random sequence of letters, which incidentally humans can read very well but a robot cannot.

You will see pictures like these in the “Leave a reply” section and will have to read and type the 5 chars within 0..9 and A..F (case insensitive), and submit the form. Please note that there is no “O” in there and hence no confusion between “0 (zero)” and “O (the letter o)”.

For these two images, you will have to enter “92448″ and “2716c” in box, after which your comment will immediately appear on the website. I hope this additional step will not be a problem to the readers who will continue to review and critique the website. I have offloaded a part of the burden on website maintenance on to the readers and I hope they would sympathize with me and understand my situation.

If there is any problem with this feature, please email me at vedic dot astrology at gmail dot com.

Readers, apologies for the delay but there is a forum software installed on this site at the following URL:

http://www.planetarypositions.com/forum/

Please take time to register yourself to this forum and to familiarize yourself to it. I am also in a learning phase with this new software and will keep posting interesting tidbits and tricks that can be used. For using this forum, please follow some simple rules and regulations:

1. Let the topic of discussion be centered along Astrology - all kinds, Vedas, Indian scriptures etc.
2. Please do not discuss politics - none of us would like to get into “secular” vs. “non-secular” discussions.
3. All the criticisms may please be made and accepted in a positive spirit.

As of now, the posts are not moderated at all and I hope it would remain that way. I also hope that there would be a lot of discussions and not the usual way where just one person is answering questions posted by other members.

Thanks!

Hello Readers,

I have been reading the comments posted to the article - “Strong third house…” and have enjoyed all the comments. Thanks a ton to Anand, Divya Jyoti and Basab Roy for making my effort of maintaining this site worthwhile.

I see a need for a forum where users can register and discuss various aspects of Vedic Astrology. Although there are already tons of sites that give you an option to do that, I just hope there are other things about planetarypositions.com that will attracts the readers here.