Lemming Tracks: Comments and Spam

Yesterday, the Lemming found one too many come-ons for Chinese-language porn sites.

Since I started blogging, I've had a policy of not moderating comments. I liked the way it kept posts up-to-date, and figured you didn't mind seeing what you'd said under the post as soon as possible.

Yesterday, that changed. Sorry, but I'm moderating comments from now on: except for one or two blogs where I think it's important to demonstrate that I'm not 'censoring' ideas that conflict with mine. I'm still thinking about those. Not the censoring - I've gotten some of my best material from people who think I'm a poo-poo head - the moderation.

Watch Your Language

This blog is in English. Although I'm more-or-less familiar with several languages, I'd appreciate it if you write your comments in English. It's the only language that you can be certain the readers of this blog understand.

That's one reason I started moderating, by the way. The most common language for a comment from a porn service was Chinese, with Japanese running a distant second. I do not track individual viewers of this blog (who has that kind of time?), but I do look at the usage logs. Quite a few visitors here almost certainly understand Chinese and/or Japanese.

What to many Westerners would be a set of attractive abstract shapes would, for those visitors, be a laundry list of obscenities. I can't be sure, but my guess is that many of the folks from east Asia are not into that sort of thing.

Anyway, the Lemming thought you might want to know what happened to the 'instant' comments.

Sorry about that, but [expletive deleted] happens.

I checked, by the way, and the system for letting me know that there's a comment to make works. I'm looking forward to your 'real' comments.