Scott Greenfield, undoubtedly still in the Halloween spirit, donned some tights and a cape this morning in an effort to save the world of legal blogs (a/k/a/ the blawgosphere) from a prophesied death. His post, while about much more than fighting spam, reminded me that I should explain how the comments work on this site.
First, here is some background for you. This is not my first blog. In previous blogging endeavors, I had to fight comment spam all the time. And that irritated me. At times, I also had to put up with abusive comments. The most cruel comment I received wanted to know when I was going to die. The commenter, of course, was not asking about my health — the commenter was saying that he or she wished I was dead.
When I started this blog, due to my previous experience with blog comments and a desire to keep a relatively professional tone on this blog, I initially did not have comments enabled. After a while, this blog felt too isolated, so I revised my comment “policy.” I decided to allow comments, but the comments would be approved by me before appearing on this blog. I also decided that I would shut down the ability to comment on posts when they fell towards the bottom of the main page. The reason for this was that I noticed, in the past, spammers would attack older posts, and if those posts didn’t have comments enabled, I would spend less time fighting the spammers. I haven’t made any additional changes to how I handle comments, so moderated and closed comments are features of this blog. For now, this is working for me and I have no plans to change the way I handle comments. The bad part for readers is that it may be a while between the time a person submits a comment and the time it appears on the blog. I am willing to pay this price for spam protection and quality control.
