Feb 26 2008
Yipee! I’m on vacation
I truly appreciate the thoughtful submissions you readers made on my blog post Who owns blog comments? and I will be referring to them as I continue to refine my comments policy. Your comments lead me to believe that my existing policy is sound, however, I do find that this self-hosted and advertising free blog has attracted many more ’spammish’ comments than it did when it was a free hosted blog. For example, I frequently receive comments linked to sites that are promoting ‘make a million on the internet’ scams.
IMO these commentators are only posting to my blog in the hopes that my other readers will click their username links to their sites and, consume whatever it is that they are selling. When I receive these commercially motivated comments, I make either one of the two following choices:
(1) Edit to remove commercial links and then post the comments. Note that I make this choice when the comment does contain commentary that directly relates to the blog post in question. Also note that I do not post a notification that states that I removed the link or links.
(2) Delete the comments. I make this choice when the comment does not contain commentary that directly relates to the blog post in question.
I have received some nasty feedback from disgruntled ‘would be’ marketers, who felt that my blog ought to function in a way that allows them to promote their business interests but, I stood firm.

