I like to receive comments on this blog – it’s always good to hear when my ramblings have helped someone out, or if someone has something else to add to something that I’ve written about – but I hate blog spam.

A few months back, someone left a comment on a post pointing to his own website (and then got upset when the Google index appeared to quote him out of context). I felt sorry for him (and the irony is that any links in comments here are tagged with rel=”nofollow” so they don’t increase PageRank and other search engine placement link counts).

This evening, I’ve spent quite a bit of time removing comments from posts that were just blatant links to suspicious websites, so, it’s with regret that I’ve had to enable comment moderation. I won’t screen comments (except to remove the obvious spam) but please bear with me if it takes a while for a comment to appear on the site – sometimes it might take a couple of days for me to approve a comment whilst other times it might be a few minutes. I still allow anonymous comments and I haven’t yet resorted to word verification – let’s hope I don’t have to, but please bear with me.

Whilst on the subject of spam, to all the people of the world who send e-mail because they think I need medication to help with (erhum) “personal problems”, I have a young son and another baby on the way so don’t think there are any issues there. Also, I don’t need cheap software, loans, or advice on hot stocks. All you’re doing is giving me some messages against which to test the intelligent message filter in Exchange Server 2003 (more on that soon).

Grrr.