I've been hit by a lot of comment spam recently. A *lot* of it.

At first, I diligently deleted it; but massive quantities over a period when I was on holiday got through.

Then I changed my mind; the reason this spam is here is that it improves someones' Google ranking, I thought. If this is the case, leaving the spam around devalues Google - and makes comment spam their problem, I thought. They'll change the way they rank pages so that comment spam is no longer worth doing, and it'll go away, I thought.

Well, that hasn't happened. Maybe it will happen one day, but it hasn't yet. And the stuff is flooding in, and is increasingly offensive - to the point where I'm feeling that leaving it up here is Really Rather Wrong.

There isn't a quick solution to this that I'm aware of, and right now time is tight. I plan to move to a new installation of MovableType, bringing together the several weblogs that are hosted on our server (and a new one that is being built right now), and will more at ways of rejecting spam then, but that will take a few weeks.

So, comments are disabled (in a pretty crude fashion). Which is a real shame because one of the things *I* get from this weblog is feedback from a group of smart folks that come here. If you want to comment on any post (positively or negatively) whilst comments are disabled, please email me and I'll add your text to the foot of the relevant post.

Hopefully normal service will be resumed soon...