Bread & Butter Issue: Comment Moderation

For the last few posts one of my most faithful commenters has been someone posting a link to an Asian porn site.  If that were all it was, I might be inclined to leave things be, and delete those comments as they come.  I'm not convinced, however, that IS all the link does, and being just clueless enough about the ways of the interwebz, I've decided to change my comment policy.  For now, I've switched over to the moderated setting, which means (for the two of you who aren't bloggers yourselves) that before a comment gets posted, I have to sign off on it.  Frankly it's rather nice that I've been able to go this long (almost five years) without having to make this switch.  It's also nice that the cause is a random spammer who seems to have figured out a way around the word verification function, rather than the irresponsible, over-heated ad hominem attacks I know have motivated the switch at other blogs.  Of course the topics here at Loose Ends rarely inspire the kind of debate that usually leads to those ad hominem attacks.  If my chirpy reports and photos of various green spaces enrage anyone, they haven't found me yet, or they haven't had it in them to post a scathing review.  No one is more surprised than I am that my blog has become such a flowers/bunnies/hearts destination.  As a pacifist socialist faggot with some rather heated positions of his own, I fully expected this venue to be a bit more controversial when I started it, but that's not where it's taken me.  I think that's all to the good, frankly.  It's been a good discipline for me to seek out positivity when I write here.  To be honest, that's not my natural tendency.   

Anyway, moderation, as opposed to Open ID (where you have to have signed on for some kind of online identity) will still allow anonymous users to post, since I have occasionally written about LGBT issues, and that has sometimes triggered anonymous comments from users who are not yet ready to come out.  Then there are all those folks who, like me, get a bit tired of having to sign up for yet another online something-or-other in order to leave a comment, so they just don't bother.  Honestly, how many different photo-sharing websites do we need, and why do no two of my friends seem to belong to the same ones?  

Okay, got a little distracted there.  So, comment moderation is now in place, I wish I didn't have to bother, but we'll see how it goes.  If, at any time, someone wants to contact me directly, remember that you can find an email link under my photo there on the left.