I welcome comments on this blog. There's no way that I want to stop any readers coming back with comments on what I have said - such discussions make a very lively ongoing debate on certain subjects, and other viewpoints add so much to what is sometimes somewhat one sided in what I write.

But, this morning, I have turned your ability to comment here off. That's because there's been a significant growth in "Comment Spam" - people or automata who are posting up messages off topic to advertise their services and bearing no relationship at all to what this site is about. To give you an idea of the scale of this, I'm seeing about 2 dozen comments an hour and that's 24 x 7.

Here's a graph of our incoming email traffic



The red section is emails which are rejected by our spam filters, and the blue are emails that are delivered to our email boxes. Each bar is 24 hours, with weekly lines. Horizontal lines every 250 emails.

But - PLEASE - comment via the forums that I use / administer. I am posting this to both my Horse's Mouth Blog - Open Source programming, Hotel, Wiltshire, Personal stuff and to my Save the Train Blog where I'm making dealing with train services (or lack thereof) from Swindon via Chippenham and Melksham to Trowbridge and Salisbury.

Forums:

Opentalk - Open Source

Save the Train - TransWilts Train Service

First Great Western Coffee Shop - Rest of First Great Western area

I look forward to your - human, real - comments on those places!

[update] 3 days into the "no comment" and you can see the effect on our mailboxes - around 250 emails a day aren't coming to my mailbox and the whole of our domain graph - left - shows the effect

See here for our live email traffic graph, and the sourse code behind it.

(written 2008-02-05, updated 2008-02-11)

 G903 - Well House Consultants - Running and moderating forums
  [3479] Practical Extraction and Reporting - using Python and Extreme Programming - (2011-10-14)
  [2820] Netiquette for forum newcomers - (2010-06-20)
  [2781] The 500 pound question to get you started - (2010-05-26)
  [2569] How to run a successful online poll / petition / survey / consultation - (2010-01-10)
  [2527] Flying tonight - (2009-12-05)
  [2526] A reluctance to move from old shoes to new - (2009-12-05)
  [2386] Computing under the influence of alcohol - (2009-08-29)
  [2254] Forum membership - a privilege not a right - (2009-06-22)
  [2177] Preventing forum spam - checks at sign up - (2009-05-12)
  [2162] Admins thoughts on banning a member from a forum - (2009-05-09)
  [2156] Stopping forum spam - control of the signup process - (2009-05-04)
  [2116] Why do we delay new forum members through authorisation? - (2009-04-03)
  [2103] Ask the Tutor - Open Source forum - (2009-03-25)
  [1972] Pettifog and forum boards away from public view - (2009-01-03)
  [1923] Making it all worthwhile - (2008-12-04)
  [1759] While the world sleeps ... - (2008-08-19)
  [1678] Software - changes and delays. But courses must run on time! - (2008-06-15)
  [1595] First Great Western Weekend - (2008-03-30)
  [1578] Please don't shout at me! - (2008-03-16)
  [1569] I dont care - goodbye - (2008-03-09)
  [1563] Guidlines for posting on a forum - (2008-03-04)
  [1539] A forum is not always the best vehicle - (2008-02-14)
  [1523] Ive just received an email from myself. Should I be worried? - (2008-01-29)
  [1485] Copyright and theft of images, bandwidth and members. - (2007-12-26)
  [1472] The Horse goes on and on - (2007-12-15)
  [1362] No Thank You - (2007-09-23)
  [1190] Save the Forum - A regular clean sweep - (2007-05-17)
  [1088] Why use BBC code not HTML? - (2007-02-21)
  [948] Running an on line campaign - (2006-11-27)
  [923] Why shouldn't I spam? - (2006-11-13)
  [919] Freedom for X is denial of privacy for Y - (2006-11-09)
  [841] Forum help - a push in the right direction - (2006-08-21)
  [828] Freedom of speech and freedom to post - (2006-08-10)
  [806] Check your user is human. Have him retype a word in a graphic - (2006-07-17)
  [651] Please Register with Opentalk - but just once! - (2006-03-19)
  [516] Open source questions? Anyone can ask. - (2005-12-03)
  [424] How not to run a forum - (2005-08-24)
  [248] Use me, but use me effectively - (2005-03-16)
  [231] Feedback as lifeblood - (2005-02-28)
  [204] The confidence to allow public comments - (2005-02-06)
  [130] Spelling and grammar - (2004-11-25)
  [115] Expiration dates or times on web pages - (2004-11-12)
  [29] Silence is Golden - (2004-08-26)
  [22] Falling out over the silliest things - (2004-08-21)

G909 - Well House Consultants - Spam, Spamming and Spammers
  [3506] Cold call contacts - preference services and turning off spam sales approaches - (2011-11-03)
  [3352] World Trade Register - Certainly NOT worth 2985 Euros. - (2011-07-09)
  [3316] Twitter Phishing Trips ... and a great new alert service - (2011-06-04)
  [3190] What do the following web sites have in common? - (2011-03-03)
  [3166] Well house is strong - confirmed? - (2011-02-11)
  [3016] The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited - (2010-10-26)
  [2884] Hotlinked images onto adult material sites - (2010-07-23)
  [2697] Email metrics and filtering - (2010-03-28)
  [2398] Websitemediasolution and a goldfish called Carl Johnson - (2009-09-06)
  [2276] Who is Marc Schneider of Multilingual Search Engine Optimization Inc - (2009-07-10)
  [2179] Offers that I can refuse - (2009-05-12)
  [2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
  [1978] From spam to mod_alias - finding resources - (2009-01-05)
  [1817] Marc Schneider is still having email trouble - (2008-09-30)
  [1763] Co-operating to save, yet we dont - (2008-08-21)
  [1115] Unexpected visitors to our site - (2007-03-22)
  [1037] Impact Engineering and Backscatter - (2007-01-16)
  [872] Email metrics - (2006-09-20)
  [495] More spam - a success story - (2005-11-13)
  [417] Telephone Preference Service - we're registered - (2005-08-17)
  [347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
  [338] OO techniques are hard to teach - (2005-06-06)
  [276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
  [268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
  [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)

Back to Expecting a item from a list of possibles

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Short and sweet and sticky - PHP form input

A Weekend in Liverpool
OO PHP demonstration - comparing objects and more
Where in the world / country is my visitor from?
Short and sweet and sticky - PHP form input
Comment spam blocked. Please comment via Forums
Expecting a item from a list of possibles
Railway Acronyms and Abbreviations
Tcl - learning how to use namespaces, packages and libraries together
Object Oriented Tcl
Selecting file names in a shell - one word or another