As I have said elsewhere ("About the Author"), I originally meant this website to feature a continual dialogue of my readers with me and each other: ingenious presentations of evidence, rapier wit, all that sort of thing. I rejoiced in 2004 when a young techie created my Message Board.

For a time it was a civilised and cosmopolitan thing. Sarah Thompson, a Londoner, deplored the condescension of sentences such as "The secretions of the vagina were valued for their odor and taste" in the essay on Donne's Elegy XVII. Stephanie Shirilan posed curious questions about the concept of the atoms of Democritus and Lucretius in the Seventeenth Century. Noel Heather of the University of London corrected my dismissal of Guillaume du Bartas as a "mediocrity" in the essay on Paradise Lost XI-XII, demonstrating that du Bartas built an ingenious number symbolism into his Biblical epic. Michael Bryson set forth the bold and brilliant hypothesis of his book The Tyranny of Heaven. Professor Stephen Ogden of Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, undertook to refute in its entirety my essay on Milton and sublapsarianism. So most of these far-flung correspondents wrote to contradict, and did well, for the Atheist Seventeenth-Century website must live in controversy like a salamander in fire.

(The news in that quarter is good. An organ of the Christian Right, a website called Human Events, http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=18167 has listed the Atheist Seventeenth Century Website among three leftist menaces more frightening than Hillary Clinton.)

Then dismaying intrusions began, horizontal blue bars with notices a brief word or phrase long, all commercial: cheap homeowner's insurance, personal loan, best cash advance, new car loan, debt loans. Medications (obtainable illegally with no prescription,it would appear): phentermine (lose weight), tramadol (relieve pain), prozac (assuage grief), zyban (stop smoking). Gamble on-line, play bingo, blackjack, Texas hold'em; own and operate your own casino. Hot sexy Russian woman looking for a man.Enlarge your penis.

Clicking on any of the horizontal blue lines, I found visuals like those in a television commercial, expensively and expertly done, emblazoned with logos of the Chase Manhattan Bank and similar pillars of wealth and respectability; how could such dignified institutions mingle with that hot sexy Russian woman, let alone the enterprise offering penis enlargement? I went to the Help Desk, the crew of SFSU techies who assist cyberstymied faculty.

Here I learned that not one of the offerings was what it seemed. Each attempted to extract from the interested party his e-mail address, social-security number, bank-account number, street address, credit-card number; anything that could be used in identity theft, credit-card fraud, or the evacuating of one's bank account. "They're all illegal operations,"said the techie. The impressive visuals were stolen and used to impersonate a website, a procedure called "spoofing." And, the spurious ads would grow like mushrooms if I didn't shut down the Message Board at once. "I've seen cases where the spam messages got up in the tens of thousands and brought down the whole system," said the techie; "We're trying to get all the faculty with message boards to shut them down."

So all disappeared,the gems of the message board and the great heap of muck and mire. I discussed the matter with a friend, a young software engineer whose wisdom I share with you.

"The battle of spam will never end. Every time the good guys invent a new spamblocker the bad guys find a way around it.

"Never give your e-mail address to anybody you don't know. It goes into the worldwide spam pool and once it goes in,it never comes out."

I was puzzled that the techies did not annihilate my Message Board,but covered it with a new webpage inscribed "Not Found,"with a self-consuming artifact, namely, these statements: "The requested object does not exist... the server has been instructed not to let you have it." My friend explained: "Nothing that is put into the Internet ever disappears. I never put anything into the internet that could get me fired, divorced, arrested, or audited by the IRS."