Last night several abusive comments were left upon the site.

Apologies all round to people who saw them and were offended.

This happened once before, and regretably is almost certain to happen again in the future.

Rather than waiting for me to see them and delete them I've implemented a quick solution to allow registered users to flag comments as abusive - this means they can be hidden (but not deleted) by readers without my explicit input.

As a quick reminder it is possible for you to delete any comments you wish which are left upon your own weblog entries. It is only article + poll comments which require my intervention. Having said that I'd rather see discussion/tolerance than comment deletion as a matter of policy...

If you wish to report a comment simply click upon the "Report This Comment" link next to the relevent comment. If several other people also report the comment it will become hidden.

To prevent abuse of this facility I may change the implementation later, but right now five users are required to hide a comment.

I almost limitted the ability to users who had previously published an article as these are in my eyes more part of the community - however that does seem discriminatory so I chose to allow all users who are registered to do this.

Hopefully we won't need to go far down this path.

Thanks to the people who mailed me links to the racist comments, that made dealing with the problem easier for me.

Here we have yet another reason why I write less at the moment. Having to do things like this isn't much fun and takes up time I could be spending writing, or adding exciting and interesting new features.