While I have been away from blogging due to a heavy load of real life obligations, I am not gone. During the course of the past few weeks there have been a number of spam comments appearing on this blog which I have deleted. This situation was escalating to the point that I had to do something.

I was happy to leave the comments unmoderated but spammers have ruined that aspect. I thought long and hard on an appropriate response (other than to kill all spammers which the law should allow us to do) and the possibilities where either to force all users who wanted to leave a comment to register, or to force all comments to reside in a moderation queue for my approval.

However, my friend Ionas told me of a plug-in that screens comments, called Akismet which I downloaded and installed. Hopefully it will be enough of a protection to allow my blog to remain open with no restriction on posting. I want this to be a forum of all opinions, but spam is not an opinion.

(To those that are confused about my calling this blog a forum, stop thinking the forum as a web application and think of it as a place for public opinion discussion, like people used to have but don’t any more)