I’ve been plagued lately by registration spam (mostly from @gmail). It doesn’t seem to be doing any harm, but it’s irritating; especially as Akismet seems to do such a good job on eliminating the comment spam.

So I’m going to make two changes here in the village of Little Storping. Firstly, for a trial period, I’m removing the requirement to register in order to comment (I originally used this to avoid comment spam). Secondly, any user who hasn’t yet commented on a post will have their registration deleted. Don’t worry if you haven’t commented yet – that’s what this post is for! Make sure you’re logged in and just stick a comment below saying, well, whatever you like, in the next 48 hours, and I’ll believe you’re human.

My apologies to those of you who miss this post and haven’t commented before midday (BST) Sunday 19th October. Of course, you don’t now need to re-register, but I like it if you do, and it allows you to edit your comments if you need to (and, of course, add and edit recipes in the Happy Ploughman!)

Update: I’ve carried out a slightly less radical cull that originally planned, removing everyone who hadn’t posted and who had an @gmail.com or @gmx.com address. I’m not picking on you guys, it’s just that’s where most of the spam seems to come from (I’m surprised gmail doesn’t filter them out…). Anyway, it’s still cut the number of registered users by 75%, and I know most of the rest of you are human…