I love MovableType, the blogging/content management software that is used on Deckchairs and many other blogs. Before I deployed MT, I was a bit of an early devotee of Blogger, which had a very simple interface and the ability to control only limited amounts of content. But one thing I really liked about Blogger, at the time, was that it did not have an inherent capacity to allow other people to comment.
I fancied writing Deckchairs as a monologue, or rather, a monoblogue.
And I did. I felt that visitors commenting on my silly charades of posts was an insult to them and a useless exercise of vanity.
Then I moved the weblog to MT and, well, I allowed comments to occur on most of the posts. I somewhat regret it for two reasons: First, because I’m still creating silly charades of posts. But second, comment spam has become a major issue. I probably spend about 5 minutes of every day just killing off comments that have automatically been generated on my weblog. These spam posts are invariably poorly written links to non-existent or porn sites. Comments spam is an evil form of using Google to get your site recognized because more links = better site. For all of its brilliance, Google plays into the dirty hands of those who use “majority rules” to gain in the search engine optimization race.
I’m tired of it, and I thought about killing all of the comments on the site in order to save it.
I’m still not sure I’m going to do it, and I know it doesn’t matter a whole lot. I’m putting together a list of comment spam resources which I’ll post sometime soon.
Postscript: This is not to discount the many generous contributions many commentors (commentators?) have made to this site. Whether Deckchairs on the Titanic is a monoblogue, as it was originally stated, and whether comment spam is worth my while is at issue.