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Some of my comments on the situation in Ireland have caused a storm of comment on some of the Irish chat lines available to parents through other websites. One person responded that it was significant that I didn=t allow comments to be posted to My Diary - I think she saw this as some kind of measure to protect myself from criticism.

This is not the case at all. When I set up this Diary (4 years ago now) I had a comments facility available and many people wrote in and added to the discussion. About 2 years ago now, the spammers moved in as well and my entries was suddenly being inundated with hundreds of comments each day. At first I diligently removed each one singly (there was no easy way of doing this) but eventually it became too much as was taking an hour each day to clean up the entries. Reluctantly I had to turn off the comments facility, for my own sanity. If you check some of the entries from 2002/2003 in the archives, you'll see the kind of garbage that was being posted in the comments section (and I don't mean the genuine comments!).

I enjoy hearing from readers and allowed all real comments to be posted, especially when they offered and opposising viewpint. l will again pursue the software company that I use to see if they have added spam blocking mechanisms to the blogging software that I am using. If I change to another form of software, I will lose the archive and that would be a shame - I have written several books worth by now and don=t want this to disappear.

I=ll keep you posted.

Posted by andrea at October 08, 2006 02:48 PM