In the interests of openness, we have compiled statistics for the posts we have deleted from the blog last month, August 2007, broken down according to person and type of comment. We have only listed those who had three or more comments deleted. There was no individuals at all that had comments deleted in August. All deleted comments were spam.

In total the site received 366 comments in August, 113 were automatically removed by spam software, and we have deleted 26, so just over 10 percent of them. This is a lower figure that usual, but even so it is notable that the number of spam comments received by the blog has rocketed. This we believe is for two reasons: the blog has become increasingly visible and so has been targeted more by spammers; and secondly, we recently upgraded our blog software and spammers have been attempting to break the anti-spam systems in place with this software version.

The good news is that we have also had an increase of real comments and at the same time none of them broke the comment policy, so none were deleted. This can only be positive in terms of greater community dialogue.