Comments on comments.
I get soo much comment spam, it blows my mind. Seriously my mind is blown. This is not a big blog. I don’t get a ton of traffic, and I rarely post things. But I get thousands of spam comments. So, I’ve done two things. First, I disabled comments on blog posts older than two weeks. That’s pretty much everything. Second, I activated “Akismet”, Automatic’s built-in anti-spam program. We’ll see how it does. If I log back in and don’t have any comments awaiting moderation, I’ll know that it did my job.
While we’re on that note, I’d like to make another note on comment moderation: please leave a comment, but if it’s not germaine, useful, helpful, or interesting, it’ll probably not get through moderation. Not that this matters, since I get about two non-spam comments a year, and they are from me. But the truth is that I’ve seen many other bloggers do this, and people cry out that this is against their free speech! What idiots. Really? Me not providing you a platform where you can spew hate or ignorance is abridging your freedom of speech? Sure, it’s abridging your free speech – that is, your ability to use platforms and tools to spread your ideas for free – but it’s not abridging your freedom of speech – your ability to spread your ideas without going to prison.