Why Don't We Have Open Comments?

Interview with a link spammer | The Register

If you've never heard of it, it's alternately called link spam, comment spam or blog spam. It is the insertion of links into blog comments. Often these links are PPC -- pills, porn, and casinos. In other words, things that most blog owners do not want in their blogs.

So one way we are battling the possiblity of these sorts of things turning up in this blog is to limit commenting to those folks who are members listed as contributors (the list is over on the right hand side of this page). It is a shame that we have to limit your free speech and interaction with us in this way. However, there is a workaround. If you want to make a comment about a blog entry you can e-mail it to the contributor and ask that they post it as a comment, or if their e-mail is not listed in their profile here, you can always send it to me and I can forward it to them. There is still no guarantee that your comment will appear in the blog, but it does give you the opportunity to interact with the author.

I always feel sad when a large group's rights are undermined by an unsavory few. A couple of years ago I had to close down the guestbook on my personal Web site because of a similar phenomena called "guestbook spam". Since I always have copies of entries e-mailed to me (comments here get e-mailed to me, too), I was quickly able to know about and delete the offensive entries. But after three days in a row, I decided that the best course of action was to remove the guestbook. Sad but true.

No one is immune from blog spam. Doc Searles (warning: contains some spam for presumably offensive links), a leader of the Linux community, has been hit on his popular blog . This is the highest profile example I have found to date.

Perhaps someday we will be able to have more open interaction here. In the meantime, in order to keep our blog a reader friendly experience, commenting is the privilege of the contributing few.