Mountains Made Low

I know I’ve had a few new readers of and commenters on MML, lately, and some of you who’ve read and commented in the past may have experienced some of the recent changes (within the past couple of months) I’ve implemented to the commenting function here. So I thought I’d take a moment to explain how commenting here works. There are two layers (beyond the spam filter layer): software (WordPress) and meatware (me).

Software
I’ve set up the WordPress software so that it holds comments from commenters it doesn’t know. How will it know me? you ask: it will know you by your email address (one of the reasons that’s a required field); if that email address already has an approved comment on the blog (in its whole history), you are considered approved to comment (don’t abuse the privilege, though, okay?), and your comment will post as soon as you enter it. If it doesn’t know the email, it holds the comment until I log in and asks me what to do with it; I can then approve it, mark it as spam, or delete it. That’s where the next layer comes in.

Meatware
When I see a held comment, I look at it, and I ask myself a few questions. The first one is Does this comment look like spam? Sometimes, after all, Akismet lets one slip through, or the spammer takes the time to do their own data entry—that’s dedication, but it’ll still get them deleted.

Then I ask, Do I know the person? I base this answer on the name they’ve chosen to enter (do I recognize the first name, the first name/last name combo, or the online “handle” they’re using?) and their email address (one of my most recent new commenters, for instance, I recognized both the first name [only] and the email address as someone I’ve known for almost 10 years; easy enough).

If that doesn’t work, I ask myself how did they find the blog? If they clicked the link on my Facebook profile, they’re a Facebook friend, and that’s good enough for me; Google (and other search engine) traffic is a little more suspect as is traffic from other random blogs (blogs of people I know is another fairly safe source, assuming everything else seems legit).

Finally, if I’m still not sure, I check out their activity on the blog (this is where the out-of-control stats package is helpful): what have they looked at? have they used the search box looking for anything in particular? I match up the IP address from the comment to that IP’s activity on the blog. Foolproof? No. Pretty darn good? Yep.

There are other things I look at—like whether the email address seems like it’s a real address; I know that’s definitely not foolproof, but it’s a vibe kind of thing.

What More Is There to Say?
So that’s the scoop for those who are wondering. Wondering why your first comment was held, but subsequent ones have gone right through. Wondering where your comment is that hasn’t shown up.

I welcome comments; I love hearing from those of you who read and care enough about what you read to respond. I value every thought that you decide to share and every discussion we’ve had in the comments. Just thought you should know what the process is.

…on a much lighter note.

If you’re googling me, looking for the blog, and checking up, for whatever reason, on my love life (a pattern that I’ve noticed—arrive to the home page from Google and then click right on through to the “dating” category)—a practice that I find both bizarre and oddly flattering—I would remind you that the “dating” category is not that exciting, because some things I keep private. If you want to know what I’m thinking about that part of life, in general, though, you’ll probably be more interested in the “relationships” tag.

And thanks for reading!

…how many of you thought that my last post was going to be a violation of one of my hard and fast Blog Rules?

Sorry, no shocking revelations.