Balkinization: New comments policy on the blog

New comments policy on the blog

In 2009 I adopted a policy of turning off comments on the blog by default, but allowing individual members of the blog to permit comments.

Starting this week, in those posts where comments have been turned on, only other members of the blog may post comments.

UPDATE: Several people have written me to ask whether the change in comments policy is due to trolls and personal abuse. It is partly that, but only partly. The abuse and bad behavior in the comments section has been going on for a long time.

An equally great, if not greater problem, is spam. On Blogger, if you open a comments section--and even if you use Blogger's anti-spam features--you will still be inundated with hundreds of spam posts each day, seeking out any weak spots in your defenses.

In 2009 I effectively eliminated comments from the blog. The vast majority of posts since then do not have comments. But I allowed individual members of the blog to allow comments as they chose, although I have discouraged it.

Since 2009, only two blog members have regularly allowed comments. All other posts do not have comments. Nevertheless, we have been flooded with spam each time the comments gate has been opened.

Blogger reports that there are 176,000 comments on the blog in its seventeen years of existence. My guess is that 80% of them are spam posts, especially earlier in the blog's history, when Blogger's anti-spam and moderation tools were not so well developed.

Because I am the administrator of the blog, it falls to me to do the moderation. The effect of the current system is that those members of the blog who allow for comments are assigning me the task of cleaning up after these messes. I am disinclined to do this because I already have a full time job. That is why I essentially ended comments on the blog in 2009, and why I have decided to close the door on most comments for the small remaining number of posts. From now on only members of the blog will be able to comment, and I trust that they will rarely post advertisements for reverse mortgages or comments in languages that none of them understand.

There are several solutions to the spam problem. I could leave Blogger and move to a different platform with better anti-spam and moderation functions. I could try to locate and employ third-party anti-spam plug-ins to add to Blogger. I could hire a programmer and create my own spam tools. I could hire a person to moderate comments at my expense.

I have chosen to do none of these things. The blog works fine without comments, as it has for most of its seventeen years of existence.

Posted 11:30 AM by JB [link]