Commenting Policy

One of the chores associated with running a blog is weeding out the comments. Compared to most, I've been very fortunate in the quality, civility, intelligence, and relevance of the comments I receive; my readers may not be numerous -- somewhere between 100 and 200 most days -- but you certainly make up for it in quality. Thanks!

However, I do have to delete some comments, mainly of the "purple ink" rant variety. There are people out there who seem to page randomly through Blogger, pasting in angry little essays about various global conspiracies and suchlike. Then there are the "spam" comments -- you must have seen them on various blogs, repeated bland messages from people with improbable names. I assume that when you click through to see who "Hans Spambender" is, or why "Harriet Woolstenhulme" can't speak English ("Blog is good!! Perhaps you learn me blog myself??") you end up on a website you really wish you hadn't visited.  The Blogger Spam Filter nails a lot of these, but not all.

I get these comments, of course, because I don't moderate comments, and will even accept anonymous commenters. Up to now, I've been happy with this policy. However, in recent times the volume of irrelevant spam comments has been increasing and this is tedious to deal with, so I'm moving my setting up one notch from "Anyone may comment" to "Registered users only". From now on, I'm afraid, you'll need to be registered with someone to be able to leave a comment (registering with Google is easy, but it needn't be Google, and Open ID is acceptable). As most of you "frequent commenters" are already in this category, I don't think this will be a problem.  If it is a problem, I'll change it again.


The big plus will be that I can probably turn off that increasingly frustrating anti-robot "captcha" check.  On which subject, you might find this an interesting read:  The Evolution of Those Annoying Online Security Tests.

As to those of you who occasionally accuse me of hypocrisy, inconsistency, idiocy and various other vices -- please carry on, by all means. I will only delete bona fide comments when they descend into personal abuse of me or other commenters, or if they are expressed in language which strikes me as unnecessarily coarse.  Or if they are more than usually badly spelled, of course.

I am not a politician, and I don't have to pretend to be even-handed, or fair. To paraphrase the famous WW1 cartoon, "If you knows a better blog, go to it!"