Housekeeping

This is just a brief post partly to apologise for some missed comments and partly to simply get it off my chest.

This morning I went to comment moderation in settings to do some housekeeping. I thought I did it most days but I've obviously slipped up in the last week or so. 

In moderation there were 166 spam comments to be deleted and 3 comments for allowing through that I had missed. I apologise to those whose comments I'd not moderated. The trouble with so much is that the good gets lost amongst the bad,

I have to say that some of the spam I've had recently has been of a nature that even I found offensive. 

Given that I presume we all mark these as spam I cannot fathom why Google's algorithms don't pick them up and automatically send them to junk. Particularly as some of my incoming ordinary mail gets occasionally sent to junk for no apparent reason.

Comments

When I started blogging in 2007 Blogger didn't have any provision for responding to individual comments except by making another comment (which would appear at the end of the comments). Very rarely if ever can I recall 'conversations' in comments. My blogs were started as a combination of a diary and a way of keeping friends in the country I wasn't living in at the time up to date with what I was doing. Consequently I wasn't really writing with comments as an expectation. 

Gradually, though, more dialogues have developed and now comments and commenting is an integral part of blogging. Sometimes it's a way of saying that I've visited although I recall in the early days of Adrian's blogging wondering just how many ways it was possible to say that someone's photos were so good. As we got to know each other and Adrian posted about places I knew or wanted to know and as he got more acerbic the comments became more 'interesting'. It's hard to comment, too, with many photo blogs like Liz's.  On the other hand some bloggers like Yorkshire Pudding or Frances Garrood (with very different blogs and styles) write posts that would overall be pointless if one could not comment.

Most of the blogs that I follow (which is not that many really) have manageable comments. However one blog that I follow has more comments than many of the rest of us put together: Jenny Woolf's An English Travel Writer. As a consequence Jenny wrote the following recently:

Thanks to everyone for the comments, I really appreciate them all and read them avidly! It is funny, although I have been blogging for years I still puzzle about how to manage comments, I wonder if anyone else has this problem. The 3 alternatives seem to be to reply individually, reply in a lengthy response taking in a lot of peoples' different points, or say nothing. I THINK it's best to treat it like I would do if it was a real life party, i.e. respond to everyone individually, but that can feel pretty frantic. Sometimes it is good just to listen and nod - but then perhaps people think you're not interested or not thinking about it. (I do in fact think about everything that people write in their comments). A "group" response to things that several people have said interests me most because it draws together different ideas and aspects, but I don't think many people would see a "group response" unless they're looking out for one. I think that responses only get sent on to subscribers if they're linked to their own comments. Hmmmmm.........

Some of the responses to that comment were quite interesting. I recall a fellow blogger telling me that he never ticked the 'Notify me' box because he never read other people's comments nor responses to his because he just didn't have the time. He did read a lot of blogs though.  It was that comment that made me realise that I always wanted to keep the blogs I follow to a manageable number because, for me, blogging is participatory. So although I sometimes don't comment and sometimes even when I do I have little to say I do try and keep up with both blogs and the comments made on them.

I don't blog as frequently as some nor, indeed, as often as I used to but I try and read all the blogs I follow and comment when I feel that I have something to say (and sometimes even if I don't!).

Your thoughts?