Blog changes

After my vacation mentioned a few days ago, I decided to open up my blog to all comments (previously, you had to sign in). My hope is to encourage more comments from all people, even people who want to remain anonymous. However, I've enabled moderation in order to filter out the garbage.

Well, it seems to have worked, I've received three anonymous comments in three days. Trouble was, they were all spam. The last one bothered me a little. The comment praised my general idea (gotta love that), but criticized my lack of specifics. As I read the note trying to decide whether to approve or disapprove, I chucked about the criticism, the comment itself lacked specifics.

What made me decide NOT to post the comment was the hot-links at the bottom for various websites. But it did make me think and decide to explain my reasoning for moderation and my approval process.

If I see a comment that is on subject (or even off subject somewhat), has no profanity and no advertising, I will publish it, whether I agree with it or not and whether it's praise, criticism or something else. I will allow a link to your blog if you include one, but I will check it out first (to protect my readers).

Readers - I encourage you to click on the "comments" in each blog post and add comments to the stream. A comment in the stream does not mean I agree with or endorse the ideas, but it does mean I've read the comment and feel it's clear of profanity and advertising spam. If the comment includes a hot-link, click on it at your risk, but I will typically comment on whether or not I checked it out.

Thanks again for your readership.

Moderation is for monks....

A few weeks ago, I received some comments on my blog for very old blog posts. I don't mind, but these were obviously spam. So I turned on moderation for old posts.

However, I didn't realize that I had to actively look for comments held in moderation. This morning I found I had 15 comments held, all but one were spam.

I look at this as a good news/bad news situation, I had 14 spam comments held and you, my loyal reader, won't have to bother with those. Unfortunately, one valid comment was held by my ignorance. My sincere apologies.

As it is, anyone (including anonymous readers) can comment on recent blog posts. If the post is over 14 days old, I will moderate. I will ONLY reject comments that seem to be spam - ads for medical sales or other sales. If you feel I have rejected your comment unfairly, either email me (my email address is in my profile) or comment on a more recent post.

I will not reject posts that simply disagree with me (that would get rid of most of my comments).

Thanks to all who comment.

P.S. Anyone know the rest of the quote in the subject line?

Comments, comments

Recently, I've gotten some comments that are less than stellar. These have mostly been on old blog posts and I found out I can moderate posts older than 14 days. This seemed a reasonable compromise to me, as I really don't want to moderate. I spend too many hours away from the computer and wouldn't be able to moderate in a timely fashion.

Just today I got a post on a recent blog entry that seems a little racy. I can't guarantee that the link that was posted is to a porn site, but it sure sounds that way and I'm not going to test it.

So what to do? Do I turn on moderation and only allow legitimate posts? Or do I just accept this as part of the cost? It actually shows that my blog is hitting higher on some search engine somewhere, so I guess that's a good thing.

(Note, I posted this entry twice. In the process of some other clean up, I deleted the first entry).