In the interests of openness, we have compiled statistics for the posts we have deleted from the blog last month, October 2007, broken down according to person and type of comment. Apologies for the late posting. It was only noticed that October’s post was missing when the stats for November were being compiled. We have only listed those who had three or more comments deleted. There were six with two comments deleted, and the remainder 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 received 1,599 comments in October, 1,409 were automatically removed by spam software, and we have deleted 40 of the remainder, so just over 21 percent of them. This is much higher than we are happy with, and was a combination of an ongoing wave of spam and persistent irrelevant posts from one individual who has appeared frequently on these deleted comments summaries. We are still improving our filters for spam comments and trackbacks, which appear to be working as we have recently noticed a move away from automated spam to human comments – where people post seemingly relevant comments in order to add in a link to their particular website.

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.