Moderating Comments

This blog has "moderated" comments. This means that I have to approve or reject a comment that someone posts.

Why?

It took only a week after I started the blog for it to begin getting comments that had nothing to do with poetry (including people trying to link to all the same crap that you get in your email - Cialis, cheap drugs, moneymaking schemes and a few obscenity-filled rants on politics).

This week there was an anonymous post about the blog being moderated. It said:
"I feel this blog is rubbish, moderated by either a foolish and whimsical comment nazi or a lazy sod, rarely updated and no good for discussion."

Comment nazi is an interesting term. Perhaps it's too many years of teaching that makes me want to organize and put a format to the blog. I think it's still a valid forum for discussion - about poetry. The main site (Poets Online) is similar I suppose. We offer a writing prompt. We consider only poems that address the prompt. I regularly get more poems that DO NOT address the prompt than do. (Large numbers of religious poems, for example, and - sadder to reject - poems that appear to be earnest poems by young people.) But that's the caveat that comes with the package. (Double checked that - a caveat is "a modifying or cautionary detail to be considered when evaluating, interpreting, or doing something")

The comment continues: "There will be no discussion."
That would be unfortunate, since discussion was half the intent. (Expanding on the prompts was the other half.) Still, if you survey the blogosphere, you will see that there are many blogs that allow no commenting at all. " A weblog or blog is a web-based publication of periodic articles (posts), usually presented in reverse chronological order. It is an online journal with one or many contributors, " says Wikipedia. And I think I fit safely in that definition.

Caveat lector.