For the last couple of days – and ongoing – we have been getting vast quantities of comment spam, over 1,000 per day. 99.99% are automatically filtered out by our defences and I mop up the rest. However it has a couple of consequences.

I usually scan the spam comment list for any genuine comments that have been wrongly flagged as spam. There have been too many lately for me to do that, so if you posted a comment on the blog since Sunday and it hasn’t appeared, sorry, it has gone with the porn, medication and real estate spam.

If the blog has seemed particularly slow to load over the last few days, it may be that you arrived at the same time as a spam flood – they come in batches. Our server is under a bit of strain at those moments.

Hopefully, this will pass and we’ll go back to the usual 200 or so a day. There’s nothing I can do about it in the meantime, I’m afraid.