Comment Administration

This brief post serves two purposes.

First, it’s a test to see if my IFTTT workflow will successfully post a link to this post on Twitter and my super secret Discord server which isn’t really a secret but I just haven’t had any particular need to tell anyone about it.

Second, with the start of Blaugust I noticed a sudden burst of comments, which is great, except some of them were pretty clearly spam comments. At least, I interpreted them as spam, and removed them. (Weirdly I thought requiring a Google or Twitter login would eliminate almost all spam by default.)

It turned out that I had never set myself up as an administrator on my own site, so I had to jump through some hoops this morning, by which I mean edit some Linux config files in a terminal window, before I could actually administer the comments. Somehow I’d managed to run for almost a year without seeing a single comment that needed moderation.

I still need to write a full comment policy, but for the time being, if a comment is from someone I don’t recognize and it’s got a link to somewhere to buy stuff, I’m probably going to interpret that as spam and delete it and/or block the account. Especially if it’s on older posts. In my experience, valid comments typically only arrive on posts that are less than a few days old.

Also just another note that unlike WordPress, comments are pretty ephemeral on this site… I wouldn’t recommend writing something that you expect to live on the Internet forever. It’s more of a direct message than a publication platform, if you will.