Apart from the index for my Inkscape articles, I haven’t been actively updating this blog for quite some time. To be honest I’m more likely to post on Twitter these days, and I don’t often do that.

But that hasn’t stopped the spammers trying to post here en masse. Having taken my eye off the site for a while, I’ve now got several thousand comments to sort through – almost every one of them spam. And new comments are arriving as fast as I can clear out the old ones, like a modern-day trial of Sisyphus.

I’ve therefore decided to disable comments on all my older posts. I’ll leave them enabled on recent entries, with the caveat that even those will be disabled as “recent” becomes “historic”. I may re-enable comments on selected older posts – once I’ve got the spam under control – if it looks like there may still be useful contributions that others may make. But for majority of posts, I’m afraid any discussion will be closed.

This leads to two important points:

1. I apologise for any genuine comments that get thrown out in the spam cull. I am doing my best to keep an eye out for real discussion from real people, but there are bound to be some that are caught up in the sheer volume of comments I have to wade through.
2. If you really do need to add something to an older post – especially where it’s a useful piece of technical information – feel free to reach out to me via other means. You could even respond to this post (for which comments are enabled, at least for now), to ask me to re-open comments on another entry.

I don’t like having to do this – I would much prefer to encourage seamless and easy discussion of my posts – but the current situation is untenable, and I have to do something about it. This is the least-bad option I could think of.