Category: Comment Policy

This is supposedly where the idea of electronic communication being called spam comes from.

If you run your own blog and are new to it, feel free to welcome comments if you will.  However, I suggest you moderate the comments, and if you get one that doesn’t appear to relate to anything you’ve written, don’t publish it. 

What some spammers do is send out what seems like a real comment to test a blog.  Then, if the comment gets published, they start with the spam for Viagra, Cialis, etal.  I made that mistake at least once, and now I get at least one comment an hour that has nothing to do with what I’ve written. 

It’s too bad the people who do this never check back to see if the spam messages they send get published.  They won’t get published here.  Regular comments are more than welcome.  Spam comments aren’t welcome, and won’t get published, even if they are accompanied by spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam and spam.

I don’t know if I changed it inadvertently, or if the folks at Word Press did during one of their software updates, but until today, you had to be a logged in user of Word Press to comment on the Sisyphus Project. However it got that way, you no longer have to log in to post a comment. The comment block does require some information, including an email address that won’t be published. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to be a real email address. I’m absolutely sure I won’t be verifying them.

I hope this will increase the number of comments and commentators.

All comments are moderated because I don’t want you to know how much money my friend’s cousin made last month working part-time from home on her laptop. A panel of moderators has been carefully selected by me. It is my blog, you know. This panel consists of me. All decisions made by the moderators are both arbitrary and final.

If you have your very own blog, here’s something to watch out for. It may take a while because I’ve had my very own blog for almost five years and this just happened to me.

I don’t do anything to publicize my blog because I pay for the bandwidth myself, I don’t want to pay more, and I write this more to entertain myself than for any other purpose. Nevertheless, the number of hits I get each month has continued to grow. It’s now around eight thousand. Also, the first time I ever Googled the phrase “Things I Want (Or Need) To Know,” I got 8 hits. Most recently, I got 899,000. I’ve even had one re-post that I’m aware of.

I am entertaining myself, I have a few readers and I’ve had three legit commenters (I’d like more). Two of them are friends who also blog. In the third instance, I stayed at a nice hotel in South San Francisco, not far from SFO, two or three years ago and while there, I lost the battery cover off a radio I travel with. I asked the nice people at the hotel to look for it and if they found it to return it to me. They looked for it, found it and returned it. I went into my blog, said thanks and said they were nice people. I got a comment from management thanking me (more proof that they are in fact nice). Oaf that I am, I managed to delete that one instead of posting it. Sorry about that.

It’s been a while since I last talked about how I handle comments. Recent developments dictate that I do it again. Last week, I got two complimentary comments from people who seemed to speak English as a second language. They seemed odd, because the comments were very general and came in response to something I wrote 14 months ago. Still, I published them. Who likes compliments? I do. Who knows the difference between compliment and complement? Not me, so I look it up each time I use either one. Now, I think that perhaps those two comments last week were from a spambot trying to see if the comments would be posted. If I’m wrong about that, I’m sorry and I will continue to publish comments similar to those.

The software I use to post this blog gives me a good idea where the hits come from and I’ve known for a while that some of my hits are from spambots. Why do I think that last week’s comments may be fake? Because after I posted them, I got another bunch of comments, all of which seemed like spam. So, I didn’t post those. If I should ever receive a comment that seems like Spam rather than spam, I won’t publish that either, but I reserve the right to eat it.

If you read my blog, enjoy it or hate it, agree with it or disagree with it, feel free to comment. I doubt that I’ll edit your comments although I won’t allow flaming. I know that spambots don’t actually read blogs, but just for the record, all comments on this blog are moderated. If a comment seems like spam to the panel of judges I use to vet these things, it won’t be posted. The panel of judges consists of me. Decisions of the judges are arbitrary and final: It is, after all, my blog.