OK, link away, people. This particularly nasty 2 week attack by CAPTCHA defeating, htaccess blocklist defeating (a first for me) Spambots has been repelled. Another way to block them (they were coming from only 5 different China IP address blocks) has been implemented. The 2 link limit, in case no one noticed, totally defeated their purpose in life, to post links (the posts would show up linkless), but that was no deterrent, they were bots, and didn't care.
