You may have noticed earlier episodes of Murphy's Saloon reappearing as new in your RSS feed - possibly in a jumbled order. If that's the case, I'd like to apologize.

I'm in the process of doing something I never expected to do: I'm turning off your ability to make comments here about individual episodes.

Doing this has been forced by spammers, who come to this blog page each time I publish a new episode and post at least one spam message with every single episode. That's 200+ spam messages I have to go through and delete. Fortunately, I have the settings such that I have the option of deleting them before they are visible to anyone else.

This has happened three time now, and I'm tired of it. So I'm turning off the comments. You are still always welcome to email comments to murphyssaloon(at)gmail(dot)com.

What makes this particularly irritating is the fact this isn't being done by a 'bot - these posts are made by a real person (or persons) who have to type in a name and a CAPTCHA code before they can attempt to post their spew.

Yeah, there are real people who are paid to do such things, and as far as I'm concerned they are scum.