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By David Rothman

doberman Just the other day, I increased the number of comments displayed on the home page of the TeleBlog—to 23 or so. Comments aren’t a little detail. My blog articles, and Robert’s and others’, should be considered just the start of a dialogue. I’m repeating this—yes I’ve said it before—to emphasize how frustrated we get when our anti-spam Dobermans chew up your comments, whether you agree with us or not.

Here’s how to help. Please report any difficulties—via an email to Robert with a cc to me. If you’re making a long post, write it in your word-process or editor, then paste it in. That way, if there’s a problem, you haven’t lost your comment. What’s more, if the second or third try doesn’t work, then e-mail your comment to Robert and me and we’ll put it up ourselves. If your post has a number of links, and the Dobermans get the wrong idea, but you feel they need to be in there, we’ll help you bypass our zealous spam fighters. Also please do keep in mind that if you’re posting for the first time, you probably will end up in moderation. That’s routine.

Meanwhile Robert will keep tweaking our anti-spam filters. As frustrating as our problems are, I know of other site where they are worse.

I doubt that people will get any better—the spammers are as persistent as they are obnoxious–but maybe someday the technology will. Our anti-spam service, Akismet, has blocked perhaps a million or so spams. Alas, there’ll inevitably be false positives.

As for other tips–well, just write factually and clearly and be civil toward other TeleBlog community participants. Just about all the TeleBlog comments are that way already. My biggest frustration about the comments? That they’re not in the main part of the blog. I’m very happy with the quality. So please—hang in there, and pardon our Dobermans.

OK, we’ll, er, welcome your comments…on this post about comments.

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