I read an awful lot of blogs via an aggregator, which means that I only get exposed to the comments if I do some clicking. I know from the feedburner logs that a substantial fraction of the readers of this blog do the same thing. That's certainly fine—that's what the feed is for. But I thought I ought to mention to long-time readers that in the past couple of weeks the comments have heated up, and that overall the discussion on some of the more active threads has been both meaty and (with minor exceptions) breathtakingly respectful. I'm impressed, and you might be too.
So far I have had no need to revise my comments policy although of course I'm always open to suggestions on that or anything else. (The one exception may be “would you add this blog I just found to the blogroll” — I blogroll only the sites I read or scan via the aggregator. I'm certainly happy to hear about new sites, but rarely list them until I decide if I'm going to be a daily reader.)
I should also mention that I have closed the comments on a very small number of ancient posts because they were being repeatedly targeted by comment spammers. They must all be in cahoots.
