In the interests of openness, we have compiled statistics for the posts we have deleted from the blog last month, May 2007, broken down according to person and type of comment. We have only listed those who had three or more comments deleted. There was one person with two comments deleted, and seven with just one comment deleted.

The figures do not perfectly represent what appears on the blog as comments that are made to a deleted comment also do not appear on the site, so while the responding comment may have been perfectly reasonable, it will not appear.

In total the site has received 520 comments in May, 30 were automatically removed by spam software, and we have deleted 12, so just over two percent of them. This is a vast improvement on the past two months, where the RegisterFly issue has seen several individuals target the ICANN blog. There was still a lot of anger surrounding RegisterFly, but for the most part posters respected the blog comment policy and so there was less need to remove comments.

The stats are given in tables below:

Above are the deleted comments broken down according to type. These types are outlined in our Comment Policy. We may add or remove types over time as the situation demands.

N.B. We are considering introducing stats for “edited comments” – where the message of a comment is retained but the comment itself edited, usually because someone has copy-pasted text from elsewhere. At the moment, there are relatively few edited comments, but if they grow substantially, they will be included in these monthly stats.