Is that you Norman?

A while back I made a blog design decision – to encourage comments I disenabled word verification. I figured that anyone generous enough to read and leave a comment deserved to find the process as easy as write, write, write and click.

Word verification slowed the whole thing down and, if you were like me, you would find the things impossible to fathom and give up.

The price for this open door policy is, apparently, spam (or splog) and sure enough I get some and occasionally I have to do a bit of deleting.

If you are a regular reader you will have come across anonymous, who may or may not be Norman and who leaves comments on this blog from time to time. In them he/she/it thanks me for the help I have given with their college assignments, a little surprisingly unless he/she/it is studying advanced weirdness.

The comments look like spam but might not be – there is no link to anything, nothing is being sold or offered and although English is clearly a struggle, and my blog posts can be of no help to someone studying Spanish, I have always tried to engage in dialogue.

However…

The hosts of this blog have introduced a new aggressive filtering system that automatically refuses to publish anything that is considered spam – it still turns up in my email inbox (because I enabled something else) but you the reader are sometimes missing out on some hilarious stuff.

Aforementioned anonymous is a victim of this new filter and no longer automatically gets through, and I suspect I might not be the only person missing him/her/it.

So I just wanted to say, if you are out there, that I am not ignoring you or trashing you and to try and make your comments look a little less like spam, add a “hi Chris” or something else personal and pertinent.

And in case anyone else is wondering about the other stuff that is filtered out, well, there seems to be a lot of Viagra in Canada that someone is keen to shift and there are a lot of folk in Nigeria that have inherited a LOT of money that they need to share with someone to be able to claim it.

If you want them to get in touch directly let me know.