Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-02-05 23:24:27 - Graham Ellis
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.
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.
[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