comment moderation: is there an option?

Dear blog readers,

While it hasn’t been a big problem, within the last week I have noticed there seems to be a new spam artist on the prowl. Spam doesn’t necessarily mean scam, but I suspect that when you scroll through the reader comments you hope to be entertained by reader comments – not comments about business opportunities or amazing news venues that are clearly spam. I apologize for this.

When I started this blog, I wanted to leave the comment section free of moderation, open to anyone and everyone. The purpose in that was to allow readers to share comments whether or not they have a blogger account or an OpenID. Not all of us do and I didn’t want to exclude someone who genuinely had something to comment or contribute to the conversation.

However, with such an open door it is inevitable, sadly, that spammers show up. It wasn’t common, it’s not yet a problem, but I really don’t want to wait until it is a problem. In time, we may see more and more generic, redirecting comments and I don’t want you true blog readers to have to sift through spam in yet another area of your online reading. There’s enough junk on the ‘net. We don’t need it here.

Thus, I have elected to moderate comments. All that means is that when you post a comment, it won’t be shared immediately. I’ll have to approve the comment before it is shown live in the comment section. Please know that this is not meant to be a censor of reader comments; I’m just not sure of the options in keeping spammers out with another method.

Is there a way to delete comments once posted? Do you know how to block spam without moderating comments? If you have a suggestion, let me know. I’d love to hear about an alternative.

For the time being, though, please feel free to keep the comments coming. I apologize for the inconvenience of this, but I’ll do my best to click you through as quickly as possible when I see there is an incoming comment. I genuinely do appreciate it when you have something to say!

Thank you for your understanding and patience with this action. I welcome all reader comments on the blog and, as many of you know, I also welcome those emails. So, keep the feedback coming and if an alternate option for moderation comes to mind, be sure to let me know.

Thanks, again. I’ll see you with tomorrow’s regularly scheduled post!