Bots and real people

Unfortunately, some bots have created hundreds of dummy accounts on the system. I'm in the process of removing them. To identify them, I've scored each account on various things: whether the local area has been set up or not, whether various items have been ticked, whether the email looks valid. Most of them are obvious, but some are not.

In the process, some real accounts may have been deleted by mistake. If yours was one of them, I apologise; please set up a new account. On the other hand, it was probably because you hadn't set them up properly in the first place...

Also, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of accounts that request emails, but don't specify which time of day they are to be delivered, nor for which area they are. In future, I'm going to let you get a week's warnings, then set your email delivery to 'never', to stop me wasting precious email resources to send you messages that obviously you're not reading.

If you're not getting the emails you expected, it's because you haven't set up your account correctly. Go to 'my account'/'edit'/'Email settings', and set up the email frequency and the time you want the email delivered. Then go to 'Set up maps and feeds' on the main menu, and set up an area of interest. Only then will the system be able to send you an email.

In future, if you set up nothing on your account, I'll assume that your account was created by a bot, and delete it. (You will get an email to tell you I've done just that).

Oh, and many thanks to those few subscribers who have donated to the site. They will be getting some extra goodies to reward them in the near future. All the rest of you, thank them for subsiding your accounts!