The Diary of Samuel Pepys - Site News

Please keep diary annotations on-topic

Phil Gyford — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:48:28 +0000

I’ve just removed several recent annotations from the site because they were discussions that were clearly off-topic – the topic being that day’s diary entry. For the record, I’ve removed this many annotations from these entries:

It might be worth re-familiarising yourselves with the annotation guidelines which include:

Keep it relevant
All annotations should be relevant to the Diary entry or Encyclopedia topic they are posted to. Any annotations referring to present-day events should directly help our understanding of the diary.
This isn’t a discussion forum.
While personal anecdotes can be illuminating they should be brief, on-topic and contribute to other readers’ understanding of the diary.

If you wish to discuss anything that isn’t directly relevant to that day’s diary entry, you’re free to do so in the discussion group. Annotations on a diary entry should, hopefully, still be of interest to people wanting to understand that entry in ten or more years time.

Read the comments

Do not use AI for annotations

Phil Gyford — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:42:05 +0000

I’ve just updated the annotation guidelines for the first time in many years to add this rule: “Do not use or quote from any form of ‘AI’ tool in your annotations.”

As far as I know we haven’t had much of this on the site so far but I wanted to state a position on it before it (possibly) becomes common. Any annotations that appear to use AI / LLMs will be deleted.

Why?

While they’re improving all the time, they are often unreliable. While they may sound confident you should still verify every fact. In which case, just do the research yourself.
It’s very “low effort”. Anyone can ask an AI a question to get the same answer you have.
Similarly, it removes much thinking about the content or format of your annotation. Make your annotations concise and to the point, don’t simply paste in paragraphs from an AI.
All the ethical issues related to AIs in general: the hoovering up of copyright material, the environmental concerns, the complicity of many AI founders with the far-right.

These tools add nothing to our discussions here, and detract from the decades of human conversation that’s been taking place.

If you spot any AI annotations, feel free to use the Flag link to report them. Thanks!

Read the comments

2025 update

Phil Gyford — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:32:05 +0000

Just as I’ve done for the past few years (2024, 2023, 2022) here are some statistics about the year just passed on this site.

Costs

The costs of running the site are about the same as last year – averaging around £66 per month – so I won’t repeat the same table as in that post.

There are currently 14 people contributing monthly towards the cost of the site, and 34 more who contributed one-off amounts, all via the Ko-fi page. Thank you so much to all of you for more than covering the site’s costs! There’s no need at all to do so, and no extra features or kudos if you do, so I really appreciate it.

Stats

During 2025 the site had 1,707,540 page views and 1,133,140 “visits”. These are both substantially higher than last year’s figures, by around 25% and 40% respectively.

It’s impossible to know quite how accurate the figures are or how many of these visits and views are “real” people as opposed to automated systems. Cloudflare, whose analytics I’m using, claim to block such things but all sites have suffered from huge amounts of traffic from systems scraping content for “AI” and it’s hard to stop it all.

November saw the highest traffic to the site in the 20 years I’ve been tracking it, with 249,130 page views and 201,140 visits.

In the last 30 days, 46% of visits came from China, which leads me to suspect these are automated, unless many Chinese have suddenly become fascinated by this 17th century Londoner! 18% were from the UK, 16% from the US, and 2% from Canada.

UPDATE (17 Jan 2026): Here’s a table of the ten countries the site has most visits from over the past 30 days, also showing the percentages if we discount the presumably-automated Chinese visits:

Country	Visits	Percent of visits	Excluding China
China	62,410	44.2%
UK	25,190	17.8%	31.9%
USA	22,210	15.7%	28.1%
Canada	3,710	2.6%	4.7%
Vietnam	3,500	2.5%	4.4%
Brazil	2,360	1.7%	3.0%
Australia	1,690	1.2%	2.1%
India	1,440	1.0%	1.8%
Germany	1,360	1.0%	1.7%
Argentina	1,100	0.8%	1.4%

4,558 annotations were posted across the site in 2025, 1,892 more than in 2024!

There are 1,601 people receiving diary entries by email every day, six more than at the same time last year.

There are 628 members of the discussion group (43 less than a year ago) and 299 messages were posted to it in 2025, six less than in 2024.

@samuelpepys on Mastodon has 5,998 followers, and @samuelpepys.bsky.social on Bluesky has now surpassed that with 6,868 followers.

Thanks!

Thank you once again for coming to the site again over the past year, whether you’ve posted annotations, or contributed to the discussion group, or simply read a few diary entries. It all makes this worthwhile.

I added some more letters to the site – there are now 160 from before, during and after the diary – and had hoped to add more, but real-life events got in the way unfortunately. Hopefully this year!

Read the comments