Blog Maintenance

Over the past couple of days, I've received notefication that spammers are touting their commercial websites in comments to this blog.

(You may not be aware of this, but every comment made generates an email to me. This allows me to know who is saying what. It does NOT tell me which article is being commented upon.)

I looked for the spamnotes in the current posts, and haven't found them yet, so I assume they're not going to be a problem for anybody.

Still, I don't like the idea of my blog being pirated by commercial interests. I would like them to stop it, but I doubt they will do so voluntarily.

Blogger.com offers two tools which would help filter out these commercial entries:

• I can require you to register before your comment is accepted
• I can require you to verify a non-text word (you've seen the goofy typeface letters before)

I don't know about you, but when I care enough about what a blog says, I want to have my say with a minimum of hoops to jump through. It irritates me whenever I go to a typepad-hosted blog, for example, and learn that I have to register before I can comment. Worse, I never remember my ID and password for typepad, so usually I don't say what I had intended. Instead, I just go away mad.

These commercial comments aren't so intrusive that they take up a lot of my time or yours, so for the time being I have decided NOT to make it more difficult to comment to this weblog. If you want to be known as anonymous, that's fine with me. I would prefer that you let me know who you are, but it's your choice. The downside, for you, may be that I don't know who you are so I (and other readers) don't get a sense of continuity if you comment more than once or twice ... unlike, for example, the hobo brasser and norm the ungrateful.

If the commercial comments become a problem for YOU, please let me know. I'll reconsider my decision to make it as easy as possible for folks to add comments.

But I really don't want to impede reader comments. As far as I'm concerned, what YOU have to say is infinitely more interesting to me than what I had to say. Besides, without reader feedback (comments), I don't know if anybody is really interested in what I had to say.

Sure, I subscribe to a statistics service so I know if people are reading the blog. That doesn't count for much, it's just numbers.

Here in Geekistan, we're People Oriented. We want to know who you are, what you think, and what you want to know more about. Anything that makes it more awkward, difficult or inconvenient for you to provide that much-needed feedback is not A Good Thing in my opinion.

What do you think?