Moderation in Everything, Even Blogs

I resisted moderating the comments for a while, but I've suddenly been connected with a coterie of spammers and one advertised a smut site. I can't let that keep happening, so I am asking commenters to be patient for me to check that they are in the writing dialog and not the porn dialog. I am sorry to make you wait for your comments to post, but it is necessary.

Moderation is a funny word, meaning choosing the golden mean on the one side, and acting like the FBI, snooping around to make sure all is legitimate, on the other. In person, moderating a panel let's say, it's not so bad. You can point out places of major disagreements and highlight places of minor but important agreement between panelists. You can try to keep them on debatable items rather than canned speeches. I feel pretty comfortable with it in that sense. But having to vet every comment on the blog really runs against my tide. I will do it, though. I hope you legitimate discussants won't hate it too much.