spam

When I put together this website, my hope and intention was to showcase my work and share it with a wider audience. I also wanted to hear back from people, to make room on the website for them to let me know how they felt about a poem or a blog, so – wide-eyed and cyber-innocent – I left posts open for comment (subject to moderation, of course – I’m not that wide-eyed).

And some of you did. But I also learned about spam. Industrial quantities of spam generated by countless spambots. I’d log onto my site and there’d be something like 2000 comments awaiting moderation, none of them in any way connected with poetry, some suggesting they could help me increase the traffic to my site (yeah, I’ll bet) but the vast majority claiming to be from vendors of Ugg boots, Chanel, Gucci, and NFL shirts. This was bad news – partly because I had no reason to believe they’d even read my poems or blogs, which was disappointing – but also because I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing any of those products, either individually or in combination.  

So, reluctantly, I closed my blogs and poems to comments. But the spam still got through. I logged on yesterday and there were 2,399 comments awaiting moderation. Those Ugg boot vendors are nothing if not persistent. Generally, that’s something I respect, but after two years of being given the hard-sell, something snapped. I contacted my friendly web-guru, he pointed me in the direction of a plug-in (whatever that is) for the website and hey presto! No more spam.

Bliss.

All of which is my way of letting you know that all the posts – each and every poem, and each and every blog – on my website are now open for comments again. That may mean nothing to you, but it means a very great deal to me. It means the site is once again what I always wanted it to be – an avenue for communication and connection – as well as a place for me to post my work. If you’ve five minutes spare, have a mooch around. Comment if you want to. No worries if you don’t.

There’s even a new poem. I hope you enjoy it. 

Anyone fancy a pair of Ugg boots?