I’ve been looking into two seemingly unrelated bugs that I now suspect share a root cause.

• Sometimes for no obvious reason the front page goes months out of date (often following spam removal) lasting until new content is added and the cache expires.
• On rare occasions, you see scary-looking JSON (looks like code) instead of a nice web page. This lasts until the cache expires.

This evening, I added some new directives that control cache expiry. In both cases, this is for JSON content which is what the cache shows you when you want to see a post and the cache got confused. This is also how the content for the front page and other parts lazy loads into the page.

In theory, I have solved both but time will tell.

In other news, I blocked a couple of countries that only ever send spam and some (Russian) email hosts. There should be slightly less spam to be seen if it all works out.