1.
I am always glad when a reader takes the time to comment on any of my posts – whether it’s a casual or veteran visitor. I’ve been getting slightly more comments recently (sometimes even several comments in a week!) which is great.

As a response, I have made comments more visible by adding a “Recent comments” section to the side panel on the main page. This way you can also see if I have replied to your comment, without having to go back to the original post. In the same place there is also a link to a longer and more detailed list of comments.

2.
I get an awful lot of spam comments: over 1000 (yes, that is one thousand) in the first three weeks of November already. Most of them peddle medicines, porn or ringtones. Interestingly, two sources (two widespread Trojans, I guess) alone stand for 50% of all junk comments. Luckily both use very predictable commenter names so they are easy to filter out.

I don’t want to make all comments moderated – I want your legitimate comments to be published straight away, without waiting for me to moderate. Instead I’ve turned up filtering to quite strict levels. If your comment contains any links at all, it will not appear until I have manually approved it. If your comment contains any dodgy words at all (for example, names of certain drugs, or mentions of non-standard sexual acts) it will go automatically to the junk pile.

If your comment does not appear, you may inadvertently have used an innocent-seeming word that has featured frequently in comment spam (don’t ever mention ringtones, for example!) or fallen foul of some other filtering rule. In that case please let me know and I will un-junk your comment.

Inevitably some junk gets through. I clean them out once a day or so. Apologies if you happen to read any offending comments before I get to them.