As many of you have no doubt noticed, Citywire has been badly hit by spam commenters over the last few days – people leaving comments on articles and forum posts that blatantly advertise other websites which have nothing to do with us. We stop 99.9% of spam attacks, but somehow this recent batch keep getting through. And the worst part of it is that when they leave comments on busy articles or forum posts, some of you are getting this spam by email. That’s not on, and we’re very sorry that it’s happened at all.
We’re working on a permanent solution that will stop these spammers from being able to leave comments on articles at all, but in the mean time we’ve taken the decision to turn off comment notifications for our news stories. Unfortunately that means not only notifications based on whether or not you’ve commented on a story, but also watchlist alerts for news about funds and shares you’ve subscribed to. We’ll turn them back on as soon as we’ve fixed things here – but at the moment it’s the best way for us to prevent you getting adverts from these spammers, disguised as comments. The general daily email alerts will go out as normal, so you’ll still be able to keep up with what’s new on the site.
If you’ve any questions, please post them here and we’ll do our best to get answers.
