Before we dive in here, take a look at the screenshot. 2,398 spam comments caught since I last checked a couple of weeks ago. 19,135 since I upgraded my wordpress version a few months ago. That’s plenty more spam than most of my three millions of readers could even imagine getting. In the interest of complete honesty, I’ll confess that I don’t see all of those spam comments. WordPress’s Akisment plugin is great about catching a lot of them. But from time to time, it gets to where I see “please moderate me” messages from 5 or 10 spam comments every couple of days from assholes peddling Hoodia or V1agakra or whatever, and that’s more than it’s really worth to me to get the occasional “so tell me again how you do this in Drupal?” question or the odd quip from a friend. So, as you read, consider that, besides the occasional infuriating blog comment spam, I get probably a couple hundred other email spams a day, and if you have a problem with my attitude toward blog comments, I invite you to get bent.

A couple of people have given me crap about turning comments off. My general philosophy is as follows: If you know me and want to comment on something I’ve said and your comment is worth any effort at all, you probably know my email address and will just email me. If it’s not worth the extra two seconds it takes to start an email message, it’s probably not worth my time to read it. Sorry, just being honest. Really, I’m giving you credit here. I know you’re possessed of the faculties to make humorous quick one-off comments on my blog, and for the past few weeks, I’ve been saving you the effort of typing them in. You can thank me by buying me something off my Amazon list.

Given the complaints (who knew I wrote anything so compelling?), I’m turning comments back on for future posts. As most of my comment spam comes from long-uncompelling posts, perhaps I’ll just go through every once in a while and disable comments on individual posts older than a given age. Anyway, for the time being, I’m allowing comments again. Enlighten me, dear three millions of readers.