What you can do with your comments

Please comment on anything you find (or don’t find) on this web­site, by email, phone or letter​—​it’s easy enough to contact me. I’ll be pleased to hear from you, and I am very likely to reply. It could be the start of a rewarding conversation.

I used to receive and publish comments here on Marking time, and on Special places, but now, with the revamping of this web­site, I have had enough. I have switched off commenting, re­moved the comment forms, and no longer display the past com­ments. The old comments are archived in the database, but I don’t plan to dis­play them.

I have mentioned before that almost all of the incoming com­ments were spam. I used Akismet to manage the spam, and it did a very good job. Let me show you some figures. During one fort­night it recognised and blocked 43,960 spam comments, and allowed 43 through.

Of those 43,

8 were spam comments that Akismet failed to catch,
28 were so silly or juvenile that I deleted them,
6 consisted of nothing but gibberish,
1 was worth keeping.

Life’s too short…