Read before you comment

This blog is semi-moderated.

Due to the controversial nature of the issues discussed here, from hard experience it’s clear that a completely open forum would be little but a string of insults.

Your first comments to this blog will go directly into moderation and must be approved by the webmaster. After that, your comments might appear automatically. Your permission to comment might be revoked for any reason deemed appropriate. There are quite a few strangers who show up and post a troll. They are usually removed unless posting them would seem elicit the embarrassment they deserve.

We can see your email address, the screen name you use, and your IP number. Readers can only see your screen name and any link to your web page you elect to provide.

Please use a valid email address. If we find it is a fake, you will not be able to post anymore. Do not try to fool people by using different screen names and fake email addresses, your IP number doesn’t change. We can see what you are doing.

Ever since stronger moderation has been used to guide this blog, readership has gone up (doubled), so it appears to be the way to go.

Note too that spam, which you rarely see, is an ever present problem with all blogs, especially those with more readers like this one. Hundreds of spam posts are received here daily. WordPress (the host of this blog) uses a routine (Akismet) to automatically try to detect spam. Akismet yields more false positives than false negatives. In other words, your comments can unintentionally end up in the spam queue. The best way to avoid this is not to have more than one hyperlink in your comments. Multiple hyperlinks are a leading characteristic of spam sent to blogs.

We try to go through the spam and pull out valid comments, but when faced with reading through a couple hundred unpleasant attempts to take you to porn sites, lead you to web pages that will download a trojan horse, or try to sell you things, this task is generally beyond our patience.

While Ralph Maughan is the primary webmaster; Brian Ertz oftens fills in and posts.