Comment Moderation

As a general rule, I stop reading blogs that moderate comments. Even if the blog owner is an internet-addicted insomniac who is online 24/7, there will be delay between comment submissions and their publication. This delay is reason enough for me to never enable such a feature.

There are plenty of comments I delete, which is sad. Perhaps I should leave up every Asian dating website link, every non-sequitur invitation to an ad-splashed blog about business/finance, even every record of a person deleting a post or posting a comment twice accidentally. But the comments I am most conflicted about are comments made by one DM, aka Dave Mabus, real name Dennis Markuze of Montreal, Canada.

Most Recent Photo of Dennis Markuze

DM’s comments are annoying for a few reasons. He copies and pastes the same quasi-gibberish comment on all recently updated blogs at the top of Mojoey’s Atheist Blogroll. Part of DM’s goal is to cause atheist sites to moderate their comments, which I gather from the statements that begin many of his postings. My best DM impersonation of this opening:

“ENABLE SOME COMMENT MODERATION ON YOUR BLASPHEMY!”

I don’t think enabling comment moderation is an acceptable solution. One could remove oneself from the blogroll, but why should a blogger disengage from a shared community simply because of some jackass Canuck?

Frankly, I don’t find it frustrating to simply delete his comments when I get around to it. I know for a fact that I enjoy deleting them more than he enjoys posting them. His posts are also entertaining to people who find his antics to be novel. Not everyone has had contact with someone who believes Nostradamus predicted that Depeche Mode would usher in the apocalypse.

But there are those who have watched him harass the atheist/skeptic community for a while, and it seems some of those people believe leaving his comments up for any length of time will give him undo attention. Perhaps as a result of this mentality, many atheist blogs require comments to be approved before posting. They find DM and those like him to be disruptive.

Which brings me to another annoying aspect of DM’s comments: they are very long. He isn’t writing much, but he spaces it out so that his comments take up a screen or two. I think it’s pretty obvious that this is purely by design. Combined with the tangential nature of his comments, it would be hard to argue that his comments are anything but disruptive spam.

Yet, I don’t like deleting his comments. I usually do, but not always. I wish he would read the post he is commenting on and address what is said, but I guess that’s too much to ask. I would like nothing more than for a crazy religious person to come to my site and react to my posts with violent rage, since:

1. threats don’t scare me, they energize me.
2. it means I hit a nerve.
3. public rage is entertaining.
4. it’s just another thing to talk about.

I don’t want to give this DM guy attention, but it’s not like my tiny little blog post read by 10-20 people will make any difference. If you really want to stop people like DM, just ignore him… or write an entire blog post about him, which he won’t read, but will undoubtedly comment on immediately upon publication.