Oh my, what with being at the HEAD conference and all, I almost forgot: I am getting about a zillion emails now complaining about the comment spam filter on this blog. I hear you, and it makes me nuts too (I hate having to moderate 20 - 30 comments a day). So I’m switching commenting systems this weekend.
This is not a minor change. It’s a big one: the comments will be handled by the Bad Astronomy & Universe Today Bulletin Board. Basically, when a new entry is posted here on the blog, it will be mirrored on BAUT. People can then leave comments there.
There are a lot of advantages to this. For one, if you post a comment, it gets posted. No more having comment posts relegated to spam limbo. For another, it’s hard for me to enforce any rules here, and there are some I’d like to have (like no bad words, no ad hominem attacks, etc.). BAUT has moderators to help with that too.
I know some people are going to love this, and some people are going to hate it. That’s true of any change, and this one is pretty big. But I think in most ways things won’t change all that much. The level of discourse will remain pretty high, and it’ll be easier in most ways to make comments (and easier to format comments, too). When you click “Comment on this post” it’ll take you automatically to BAUT, so it’ll be pretty transparent to readers, too.
I will implement this on Sunday so there’s time to debug it (if needed) before it goes live for real and for sure on Monday.
So comment here… while you can. :-)
