Why I moderate comments

For awhile, this was the main commentor on my blog.

One of the conversations that have been brought up on the Ultimate Blog Challenge Facebook page deals with the subject of moderating comments. So given the fact that I am running behind today, and I just marked another comment as spam on another blog that I maintain, I thought that I would state (probably again as far as my regular readers are concerned) why I moderate comments on all of my blogs.

[For those who are curious about what other blog is getting spam comments, it is the Celtic Soul Jewelry and Pottery blog. And my wife would like my regular readers to know that you can always special order a mortar and pestle in the Cobalt Blue color--it is one of the glazes that turns out perfect 99% of the time.]

The reasons that I moderate all blog comments is two-fold.

The first reason is that I have been involved in certain amount of flamewars and troll baiting. As in I write something, and then trolls come out of the woodwork with pitchforks and torches to tell me that I am someone's sockpuppet. Odds are that before the end of the month, I will upset another another such soul who feels the need to put me in my place. While I do allow a certain amount of those comments to go live...because they generally amuse me...I do have my limit. For instance, implying that me and my entire readership would have blended into Germany 1939 just fine crosses the line as far as I am concerned. Double standards concerning scholarship and what is fair to say also disturbs me. Therefore, half of the comment moderation is about keeping the sockpuppets and trolls inside what I consider to be their proper limits.

The second reason is that I get a certain amount of spam comments. Like the person (or robot) that keeps trying to comment on the video post about the Cobalt Blue mortar and pestle on the other blog--their comments are all about fake sexual organs, famous people, and where you can buy items that will give you the experience of bedding said famous people. And that is the PG-13 version of their comments. (And for some reason, they believe that a large part of my audience reads German--too bad for them that I do read some German and Yiddish...and their mouths [or keyboards] should be washed out with soap.)

So anyways, those are my reasons for moderating all the comments on the various blogs that I maintain. It is not a power trip, or that I like doing that much work, or even the fact that I am a classy act...it is the mere fact that I feel that there are people out there who probably would have been looked down upon by me even when my parents were living in the trailer park.