And anyway, Vicki is on my side, that’s all that counts, guys.

This is a tough call because we who regularly visit here generally tend to be the kind who want to limit censorship, yet someone must take responsibility for seeing that the purpose of a forum remains focused.

Presently, I find it only 4 times in our responses, and once in a Word file, but what is the cut-off?

I remember the hoo-rah over libraries blocking access to Superbowl 30 sites (”Superbowl XXX”), not to mention Dick van Dyke fan pages, because of their subscription filtering programs back in the 1990’s.

The DI spam filter is a very new addition, and needs to be broken in, taught. (As in teaching, not tightness). Eventually Erich may trust it, and scan new posts after they immediately go live rather than pre-approving them.

I am privy to the editing process here. Erich has been doing a banner job of manually blocking spam responses. These guys are clever. I see many responses fool the filters and get into Erich’s response queue. Only once did I catch him promoting a spam response. One that almost could be read as being related to the post itself (except for the link to a paid links page). Erich is not counting all of these denied spams in his “denied” count.

Meanwhile, let’s remember that this is a letter forum, not a chat room.

1. The spam filters don’t actually catch all the spam. There are probably about 30 spams that slip through the filters every month. I manually kick those out.

2. The non-spam comments I’ve booted have sometimes been rejected because they were not on-point, they constituted personal attacks or they were arguably slanderous (and I don’t want to be sued–see here for some basics on defamation law). Also, some of those rejected comments have been long meandering usually incoherent diatribes that, I guarantee, no one at this site would take the time to read.

3. The things I’ve kicked out have not been close calls at all. Anyone earnestly trying to comment on a post has seen their comment published here.

4. Where the comment is earnest, but contains something inappropriate (a personal attack, for instance), I’ve edited out the personal attack or I’ve sent it back to the commenter for a self-edit, promising to publish it, if corrected according to the comment policy.

5. Call me a prude, but I’ve sometimes (maybe another 50 times, total) clipped out offensive language. I know for a fact that some children visit this blog. I can assure you, though, that words like “damn,” “crap,” “shit,” “piss” and “fuck” don’t offend me. I don’t think that reading such words harms children either. But excessive use of such words can annoy readers and detract from the content of the comment. The test for me is whether the commenter is earnestly responding to the post rather than trying to draw attention to himself/herself through the use of coarse language.

You might think that 50-100 inappropriate comments coming through would open things up for the better, but I believe that those sorts of comments can also set an inappropriate tone for other commenters. I think that 50-100 rejected non-spam comments out of 8,000 is already wide-open.

On the comments: I rarely disallow a comment. This blog has been running for almost 2 years. We’ve received almost 8,000 legitimate comments (not spam). I would bet that I’ve disallowed maybe twenty, certainly no more than 50 comments during the life of the blog. Those disallowed comments constituted personal attacks, salacious comments and a few dissertations that people slapped in, long meandering works that were obviously written before the post existed. Several of those were disallowed only after one of more co-authors questioned them (after they were initially posted). Therefore, we are posting almost all of the comments we receive.

I’d bet you’d be surprised to learn that our new anti-spam program (installed a month ago) has already snagged 6,000 spams. How many advertisements for Viagra would you like posted in our comments?