I’d like to just talk for a minute about commenting here on et geekera. We don’t get a lot of them here but we get a few. The problem is the setup that I go with on the WordPress platform. You basically have three options: 1) Comments off; 2) Comments come through as submitted; and 3) Comments set to pending until I approve them or straight through with a previously approved comment.

My experiences on The Lowdown Blog tell me that letting every comment through is just a way for spam bots to ruin your comments section and I like the discussion so I went with pending my approval. The Akismet spam filtering service on WordPress isn’t perfect. On TLB, a lot of spam comments come through. Over here, I’ve found a few comments that were legit go to spam rather than pending and other comments that were clearly spam go through to pending approval. Even after approval, there are a few of you that are still flagged as spam. Seeing as I’ve got over 1,500 spam comments saved up in my spam comment folder from the last two weeks, I’m not going to be able to through all them to see if they’re actually spam or not.

So if you’re not seeing your comments straight away: 1) I may have to get to approving it; or 2) It’s been flagged as spam. Since I can’t be checking comments for approval all the time, it may take minutes or hours for it to go up. If you need to get my attention about approving or un-spamming a comment, you can email us at etgeekera [at] gmail.com or tweet us @etgeekera.

Just keep in mind that if you’re not adding anything to the conversation, you’re not getting approved, even if you ask politely. To the guy who tried to comment this morning on a Doctor Who review with a link to his blog and Facebook page: That’s spam and you’re not getting approved. To rebloggers: Add something to your reblog besides “Reblogged by BlogX” and you generally get approved. To everyone who writes “cool article” or “nice” while making sure that there’s a link back to your blog: Write more than two words. Say something that someone might think about replying to or liking your comment. That’s when you’ll get approved.

I’m not trying to be exclusionary or pretend this microscopic part of the geek blogosphere is the most important place online. I want to make sure that 1) You know what’s happening with comments on the blog; and 2) We foster some healthy discussion and dialogue on the blog. That doesn’t mean I’m going to censor critical comments. It’s just that after seeing all the crap with the so-called #GamerGate (column coming this week), I just want to make sure this is still a nice place for people to read and talk.