The ramper/impersonator exposes a vulnerability

Those who were on the site at about 6.30pm last night would have followed the attempt of a ramper to influence the Ken and Boris betting prices by creating exchanges as though they were by regular posters here.

The “dialogue” started with him creating what purported to be a comment by me saying I had information about an exit poll saying things could be quite close. It then went to cover quite a few regular contributors and these looked like genuine posts. There was, of course, no exit poll.

Looking at the Ken and Boris prices during that period it did appear to lead to some laying of the Tory and betting on Ken with the result that the prices moved a bit. Some people commented last night that they had changed positions as a result of what was being said.

To stop this happening again the only posts that will be accepted for instant publication will be from those people that our server recognises as having contributed here before without problem. So the name and the email address must match up with previous posts.

If there is a discrepancy the post will be put into moderation to be approved/rejected when I get round to checking it. I will be giving Paul Maggs the facility to approve/reject such comments as well

Most contributors will find that they will not be affected by the change. If you are please be patient.

We cannot be operating 24/7 and there might be periods where posts by new contributors might be blocked for some time.

The important thing to remember is that one you have had a comment approved then you will be publish instantly provided you operate in a proper manner.

The BBC. This thread is illustrated with a picture from the overnight BBC coverage because I was going to have a rant about it’s awfulness. I am still furious and will probably be returning to the theme. Licence-payers deserve better

Site traffic. For several periods last night we were completely overwhelmed and had far more people trying to come on the site than we have ever had before. We did have some outages and my son Robert will be looking at ways of dealing with it. Up till midnight yesterday we had 157,918 separate page-downloads which far exceeded the previous site record of 115,794 that we had on Tuesday.

Mike Smithson