Note to readers about comments

As should be obvious to anyone who has followed this blog for any time, I do not censor comments.  I welcome comments from readers who hold diverse opinions.

In the four years I have been blogging, I have deliberately deleted less than a dozen comments—the two or three that were pornographic or used inappropriate language, and a handful of duplicates.

I mention this because I received complaints this week that I was not allowing critical comments to be posted.  Not so.

I’m guessing they got caught in the spam filter.

This site gets more than 200 spam posts a day, most of them of astonishing length in gibberish or Cyrillic.  I cannot possibly go through all that to sift out the legitimate posts.  I clear spam without looking at it.

I have not been able to figure out the screening criteria for spam but I’m guessing the filter is suspicious of long posts with links.

If your comment does not get posted, try shortening it (always a good idea anyway) and sending it without links.

And thanks for reading.   I do read all of the comments and wish I could respond to them.  Keep the comments coming!

My apologies to any of you whose comments disappeared. Please try again.