Are you Human?

Apologies to anyone trying recently to leave a reply or comment on the website, we had a technical issue whilst trying to fight the spam bots.*

Spam bots are devious internet blighters who seek loop holes in website defences in order to leave spurious messages in order to entice the unwary to follow a link.

We had a Captcha facility that prevented this happening, but our defences were breeched though a loophole. This allowed some dear fiends from Russia to leave 100’s of spam messages in our inbox. The irony is the messages were in the Cyrillic alphabet, which somewhat limited the immediate impact.

In the short term we switched the comments facility off whilst we sorted the problem. ‘Tis now all resolved and you can leave a comment verified by the Captcha filter that will verify that you are a human and not a bot, which can be quite reassuring in these technical days!

* A spambot has nothing to do with a person’s rear end after eating a surfeit of Spam fritters. This is a computer program designed to collect, or harvest, e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. A spambot can gather e-mail addresses from Web sites, newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations. Because e-mail addresses have a distinctive format, spambots are easy to write.