21 May 2008

Why This Blog is Moderated

Someone recently commented on my blog, accusing me of "censorship" for moderating blog comments. So I feel a short explanation is in order.

I decided to moderate comments on this blog after someone posted a piece of literal spam as a comment on one of my posts. While I make no efforts to restrict who can read this blog, I am not interested in providing free advertising for anyone's cell phone business, and am especially uninterested in this blog's being used to peddle "natural male enhancement".

Although I was able to delete the actual advertisement, I was unable to remove all record of it. So to avoid this situation in the future, I decided blog moderation was necessary.

So far, I have yet to reject a comment from anyone I know, in either my real life or my virtual life. I suppose that if someone started posting portions of Mein Kampf in blog comments (no Sam, this is not an invitation), I would probably refuse to publish them. But my main aim in moderating comments is not censorship but spam removal.

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