I've become a target for a really determined spammer, which employs real people to go through the process of filling in the details on the captcha and posting the spammer's websites in the comment boxes. The idea is to get the website high on Google ratings. Sounds a soul destroying way for these poor people to spend their time, but I guess if you're desperate for money it's worth doing.

These companies specialise in commenting on old posts, in the hope that the blog owner won't notice them - so if you have a blog yourself, check out comments on the old posts. Even though you may have forgotten all about them, they may have been hijacked to advertise these spammers' websites.

Since I moderate the comments, I simply deny the spam, but the volume has become so great that I'm probably deleting real comments too as I hurry through. So I'm temporarily disabling comments on the assumption that in the end the spammers will give up and go away. They usually do.

I am sorry to lose all your previous interesting comments, but they're still there and when I re-enable comments, they'll return.

Meanwhile, if you have some thoughts on anything in the blog, I'm always interested to hear - there's a contact button for a feedback form at the bottom of the menu on the left.