Spam Spam Spam Spam – and genuine comments

I've been wondering why I've not been getting comments this blog. Yes, I had set it up for comments approval but I've had no emails about this in, ooh, I dunno, about a year. Surely someone out there must have something to say in return, especially as I occasionally write things to be purposely provocative!

This morning I decided to look into this. I first checked to see if it was possible to post a comment on here. Yes, no problem, just some annoying thing about having to include and email address and a password which I thought was probably in itself dissuading people from giving feedback. So I thought I'd best change that and make it simpler. I looked into my settings and confirmed that my comments are indeed still set up for moderation pre-publication, but I also saw that I have thousands of messages to approve, and these are mostly from companies or individuals spamming me in badly written english with links to products and services that are irrelevant to the post they are written under. Hidden in amongst those are comments from real people responding to my thoughts and observations – thank you so much!

I have discovered some good feedback on posts I have written about Holloway Memories, the carvings at Cecil Sharpe House and shops in Ilford shops and more – to those of you who wrote to me and provided such useful and interesting feedback, I apologise for not getting back to you sooner.

It's great that I haven't been talking to myself all this time, but this clean-up/assessment process is going to take ages. For the past hour I have been trying to weed out the good stuff from a deep well of rubbish, and I have barely scratched the surface. This is going to take me many more hours yet because the silly 'system' on here is set up such that each comment has to be assessed individually whether to publish/spam/delete – there's no way to just check multiple boxes to do actions in one swoop. This is further exacerbated because every time I try to delete a comment it gets questioned with a subsequent 'are you sure?' pop-up, each one I mark as spam takes seconds to slowly dispappear as the list resets itself and, worse still, whenever I find a genuine comment to approve, the damn list whooshes back up to the somewhere near top (eh? why?) and I have scroll down to find my place again. Aaargh!

I promise to respond to all the real feedback, which will gradually be appearing as approved comments, after I have finished this tedious task...

Spam spam spam spam

UPDATE: ooh the irony... the spammers have been submitting comments to this post which, for the reasons above, don't get published. Bless them, tho spambots obviously can't read!