Ryan tells me that his Psychonauts site has had 913 spam comments posted to one of its news articles, and 1400 to another. That’s quite a lot, so it prompted me to have a look at my top secret log of comments that have been censored by this site’s crack team of moderators - or, more accurately, simply blocked by some fairly straightforward filters.

Can you guess how many have been blocked since last Sunday, 18th June, readers?

The answer: 1134. Man, subtlety is not the spammer’s strong suit.

No, no it doesn’t. Talking smileys are, in fact, very annoying and adverts about them, which shout “Hello!” at you when you mistakenly hover over the banner, are just one of the reasons why I usually browse with Flash disabled.

Thankfully, with Windows XP SP2, Microsoft made it easy to disable Flash in Internet Exploder. Here’s how!
1) Go to Tools > Manage Add-Ons
2) Choose “Shockwave Flash Object” from the list.
3) Click the Disable button.
4) Click OK.

And like magic, the blight of Flash will be gone from your browsing experience. It’s a bit of a pain in the arse to re-enable it when you actually want to use Flash - in other words, when you visit YouTube - but it’s infinitely better than having a profusion of badly-made pulsating banner ads flickering in your face.

If you’re using Firefox, avoiding an epileptic fit has never been easier. Simply install the FlashBlock extension and every Flash applet will be replaced with a placeholder. If you actually want to be subjected to the horrors within (or you’re on YouTube), all you need to do is click the placeholder and the Flash will play as normal.