Sarita just left the following comment:
“And responses are MODERATED? If you were that offended by the comment, just reject it! Just because someone annoys you doesn’t mean you have to try to smear them, much less expose them.”
So why do I have comment moderation on this blog?
Well, this blog seems to attract a level of comment spam far above the blogs of many of my friends, colleagues and peers (even ones with higher Technorati rank or Google PageRank).
A quick peek through Akismet, the excellent anti-comment-spam module in WordPress, shows that it is currently zapping a comment spam every 7 minutes. It’s not uncommon to have 10 or 20 comment spam attempts in the space of a few minutes.
With the above volume in mind, it’s perhaps not surprising that a fair amount manages to sneak it’s way past the security measures I have enabled – of which Akismet is just one of many. For example:
SGML. Girl spanking free pictures
(link removed)
This is why I continue to have first-comment moderation active on this blog.
(…which means the first time you leave a comment with a new email address, it must be green-flagged by me before it is published to the blog. Any future comments under that same email address are automatically published, of course.)
I would so really like to be able to turn this off – but at this time it’s just not possible with the amount of spam.
Akismet is such a great tool – but it needs to get a little better before I’ll trust it 100% for my comments.
In the meantime, let me be absolutely clear with my moderation policy:
I only dump comments that are spam or totally off-topic to the original subject. I do not remove comments that are critical of me, in case people think that’s why I have moderation on. Check out [1] [2] [3] for examples of that!