In the interests of openness, we have compiled statistics for the posts we have deleted from the blog last month, September 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 September. All deleted comments were spam.

In total the site received 1538 comments in September, 1409 were automatically removed by spam software, and we have deleted 73, so just under 5 percent of them. As can be clearly seen, the spam problem continues to escalate. Our spam filters have been slightly more efficient this month, but thanks to the overall trebling of spam in just one month, we are now manually deleted more than two spam comments per day. We will continue reviewing our anti-spam approaches to see if we can cut it back further.

On a more positive note, for the second month in a row there was no need to delete any normal comments. There were several posts this month that covered subjects where people have strongly held and sometimes opposing views, so we are delighted that that conversation managed to happen without spilling over and breaking the comment policy.