A brief note of explanation

I have recently received an email from one of my small pool of dedicated readers asking why I don't enable comments.

The short answer is that I cant, blogger* is banned here in China and I have no access to admin functions. I can post by email but that's it. I can't even look at the blog to see the results or correct the typos.

The longer answer as to why that matters is this. I used to have a couple of other blogs which have now been shut down completely. Shortly after arriving in China one of them suffered a massive spam attack in which dozens of fake comments and, worse still, fake posts purporting to come from me started appearing. These were advertising dodgy web sites and fake gold watches and couldn't, because of the ban on blogger, be cleared up from here. Even if I could have cleared them up I might still have shut the sites down. The last time this happened to me in England it took two weeks of almost constant work to fix the problem.
Spammers and virus writers should have their hands chopped off.
Draconian? Yes, but it would be fair deterrent.**

I can occasionally use a computer enabled with a VPN to check this blog and I may get my own VPN but without it I simply dare not enable comments because I have no way at all to control them.


So if you wish to comment and you are a personal friend who has my email - do it that way, email me. If you wish to comment and you aren't a personal friend who has my email address, then I'm sorry but for the time being you can't.

(*Before anyone suggests switching to wordpress, that's banned here too.

** I am of course not seriously advocating such violent measures but it's certainly true that the current risk is clearly insufficient to deter anybody. There must be something that can be done.)