A Note about Comments

It's become a common practice these days for spammers to attach comments to blog posts that are merely attempts to hijack some free advertising. The problem has become so prevalent that these comments, if completely unchecked, would quickly overwhelm most legitimate comments on a blog. I've been using Movable Type's built-in anti-spam plugins for quite a while, and they do a good job weeding out most of the hundreds of attempted spam comments every day. Still, I'm spending too much time manually removing the ones that get through each day. That obviously cuts into my blogging time, and that's unacceptable. As of today any comment with a link in it will be held for moderation, which means that it won't show up live on the site until I approve it. This will include web links in either the URL field or directly in the Comment itself. Sorry for the need to do this. I'm on the site a few times most days, so I promise to approve all comments ASAP. If I...