comments kind of return
I follow the Axiotron forum feed. They're the people that produce the modbook, and occassionally I hear some useful stuff. Over the past several weeks, though, every post is garbage:
I am 30 years old. I began to get terrible joint and muscle pain…
Please choose your favorite live action Disney movie of recent times…
And on my own blog—my current as well as my older blog—the dam seems to have broken about the same time:
Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that.… [over and over, with links to products]
Hi, I can't understand how to add your site in my rss reader… [with links to products]
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made…
If I get in early, I can read the same or similar spam in colleague's feeds before they've had a chance to clear them. Because I'm tired of it and because no conversational good really develops here, I chose to turn off comments. Now, hopefully the buggers've passed and won't be back this way for awhile. This time I won't automatically accept all comments. And, I took out the "a href" tag from the list of accepted html tags. If you have trouble, let me know. I can always add links as a footnote in the body of a post.
Sorry about the hassle. More sorry that the media always ends up being defined by the dregs.
Couldn't agree more. I have been under heavy spam attack at my external wordpress blog recently. My spam catcher plugin used to work perfectly, but now the spammers are dropping what appear to be real comments in. Drives me crazy.
I've been thinking about turning comments off lately as well ... I don't get many anymore and in the context of self reflective writing, do I need external comments? I just don't know.
Problem is for me is that I enjoy leaving comments. Not sure where I'd do that if people turned them off ... would I tweet reactions? Sounds silly and very limiting. Perhaps write my own response and track back? I feel like we've been at this for so long and are still struggling with how it should all work.
The issue about self reflection is a big one. Julia Cameron wrote a book called the Artists Way. She presented a technique for reflection called "morning papers": you get out of bed in the morning, go to your desk and fill three pages, no more, no less, with long hand stream of consciousness thought. No one reads it. It's incredibly energizing, but doesn't allow for "community". Perhaps it's all a personal process to craft who we are and the conversation is only an adjunct?
It's complex stuff and what it doesn't need is ads for car seats. I wonder if there's a way of making a closed members only system? Everyone can read and follow, but only members can comment? I would think that would be how the "trusted commenter" should work, but it doesn't seem to. I had to approve your comment regardless of the status I give you, and I'm guessing I'll have to approve my own.
EDIT: Nope- it recognized me and published right away. Maybe this will work.
The "members only" commenting thing does work on a lot of platforms -- maybe not on ours ... I just don't know. There are several blogs I read where the author wants you to register first and then you become a member of the site. That gives you the right to comment. It always pissed me off -- I think b/c I have "given" the author personal information during the registration process. I just can't come to terms with it.
The morning papers idea resonates with me, although I do long for writing for an imaginary audiences -- even though I know it is in actuality very small. I find myself writing less and less these days in a long form. I go through waves where I write quite a bit and others I sort of shy away from it. Its not that I am not thinking about things, its just that I might feel like I have people around me who are helping me work through ideas and I don't need the web as much to make that happen. That seems odd as well.
Registration pisses me off, too. One post should be sufficient. I wish it worked here. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but no matter how many times I approve posts and say "Trust Commentor(s)" -it doesn't happen. I'm still trying to figure out what's worse- giving people the sense that I don't trust them or cleaning out the crap every morning? Dunno; but I'm thinking I may just need to put up with a little abuse.