Our front page was recently hacked, or rather – infiltrated, by spam blogs adding themselves to the ’share your voice’ section. Thanks to Amber Shriver, our volunteer web director (and mechanic, and lead designer for the web task force), the offending links were removed. When they continued to pop up, it became necessary to kill the feature, at least for now.

Funny, yes. Embarrassing, sort of. But also potentially a teaching moment. No matter how many security precautions are taken, there will always be something overlooked: a 100th window left open, despite the 99 closed. It’s also worth noting that a commitment to openness in the design of the site, allowing anyone to ’share your voice’ in the conversation, can be taken advantage of by those with bad intentions. And finally, it’s interesting to watch, with some amount of admiration, the ingenuity that spammers continue to display in finding some way, anyway, to get a link under our cursors. It’s instructive to remember that this constant, sometimes completely automated, process of iteration and innovation, is itself an act of design.