I’m really grateful for those who take the time to comment on this blog.
Since late February, when I moved to wordpress, I’ve taken away the ability for people to comment anonymously – now when someone comments for the first time, their comment needs to be approved, and after that all their comments will go up automatically.
This has got rid of a lot of the sniping, mean-spirited comments that used to spoil the atmosphere here a bit. Clearly the anonymous commentators aren’t prepared to have their identities made public. I’m certainly happy for people to make constructively critical comments, but they need to use their real names. And I haven’t unapproved any comments except for those which are clearly spam.
Spam comments have been a huge problem, running at about 200 a day – it takes quite a while to go through and delete all these. For this reason, as of today, all comments will have to go through a word recognition step. I apologise for this, but spam was swamping the comment facility, and I haven’t got any other solution.
Once again, thank you for all your comments.
4 Comments on A note on comments
Excellent Jamie. Quite understand and the Blog is a lot better for getting rid of all the anonymous deadbeats.
By the way do not forget in your busy diary the Chave/La Chapelle dinner on the 14th September.
Quite concure myself (I’ve changed my nickname which I suppose wasn;t really my real name – though you do have my e-mail address)! I enjoy commenting when appropriate, so don’t mind this sort of action at all.
Hi,
No anonymous + captcha is the future for most I suspect. I’m glad you haven’t removed comments completly like some. Any chance of sign in twtter for the 140 char nerds among us?
Cheers
AK
Surprised to hear spam is such a pain. I use Akismet (comes with WordPress, but needs to be activated) and I get very few spam comments which I need to moderate.