• Moderation in all things, including moderation

    A few days ago I switched the site over, with regret, from unmoderated comments to moderated ones. The proportion of spam was getting uncomfortable, and some of it was looking a bit sinister.

    One result is that, if you are kind enough to post a comment, a few hours may pass before it appears. My apologies. I know this is a disincentive to dialogue, but it is probably better than our being inadvertently responsible for putting some monstrosity before your gaze. (The middle course would be to institute a system for "trusting" commenters. But we're trying hard, as a general policy, not to collect any information from anyone, and that includes e-mail addresses.)

    What I had not foreseen (though I should have done) was the burden of deciding what to do with hostile comments—such as the one that cropped up yesterday, attacking our wine writer, Bruce Palling. I didn't feel good about choosing to publish a casual insult to a friend and colleague; but nor did I feel good about spiking a comment which violated only the bounds of judgment and taste. In the end, I asked Bruce, and he said "go ahead and publish it". So up it went, and I'd like to think that its curmudgeonly tone helped provoke the much friendlier comments which have followed.

    Having said all that, I want to thank Eero Iloniemi, Bruce's adversary, for having signed his comment. That opens the way to conversation. Eero, I can assure you that Bruce is man of great charm, modesty, kindness and—yes—irony.

    If we were to have a comment policy, I imagine it would be something like: "Please don't say something in a comment that you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation". And I would hope that left plenty of room for manoeuvre.  read more »


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