First off, all comments must be manually approved by me, at least until such time as the commenter has established a reliable connection with my blog. I don’t trust the internet, and do believe in the peer-review process, even when the “peer,” sadly, is just me. Be aware that it might take me a day or two to get around to your comment. I am often doing other things than hovering over my keyboard in breathless anticipation of new comments.

Secondly, I utilize a fairly aggressive spam filter. Any attempt to comment where that comment contains embedded links or advertisements is automatically dumped in the spam bucket, where I permit it to languish until it is automatically deleted. Unless I get bored first, and look at what trash has been collected and then manually delete it myself.

It is embarrassingly obvious that spam “comments” are manufactured with various tools intended to make them appear as if they are genuine. When the same phrases and sentence structures appear again and again under different advertiser driven aliases, well, this is what people in my line of work sometimes refer to as a “clue.” Worse yet is when the spam generator is misused, to some rather comic effect. For example, One particularly “energetic” spammer took a standard message generator and, rather than using it to manufacture a pseudo-comment, copied and pasted the entire generator into the comment section, evidently unable to comprehend the instructions regarding how such a generator is supposed to be used.

So while I welcome civil and thoughtful comments, postings that include embedded advertisements will never see the light of day. On the other hand, uncivil and thoughtless comments might get posted if they are sufficiently amusing to me, &/or serve some illustrative purpose of my own.

Finally any emails or other communications to me regarding this blog will be matters that I will, as I choose, make public ON this blog.

Just so you know …