It’s nice to have a lot of subscribers to your site.

It’s even nicer when they comment on your posts.

Except when they’re basically trying to get a platform to link to their knock-off shoes, handbags or “pharmaceutical” sites.

I know I’ve not been maintaining this blog (I may reactivate soon), but I ended up deleting 1200 dodgy accounts yesterday, which is a waste of everyone’s time (and I’ve actually had another 9 today).

This would be followed up by a comment for the aforementioned online outlets. Which were, almost without exception, picked up by the Akismet detection routine. I still reviewed and deleted them all, though.

I tried putting in Kaptcha validation. That doesn’t seem to have slowed things down much.

So I’m afraid I’ve had to implement email password notifications. This sends you an email containing the password – so without a valid email address, the user won’t be able to sign-in, change their password, and comment.

Hopefully, in the next few days, I’ll implement another routine to delete the IDs of those who don’t respond (and make the welcome email a bit more friendly).

So … my apologies if you’ve received an email from this site that you didn’t expect. That means someone has misused your email address. Hopefully, you shouldn’t get more unwanted mail from me.

If you’re trying to post spam with a made-up email address, then I’m afraid you’re wasting your time.