I’ve recently removed the requirement for comments to be ‘moderated’ before they appear – on both my blogs.

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I didn’t consciously put them there when I first created the blogs but, getting emails asking for ‘approval’, I suddenly thought “Why do I need to approve them?”. It’s an unnecessary delaying step; if someone has taken the time to comment I’d ‘approve’ it anyway, whether I liked it or not.

What might someone say that I wouldn’t want to appear? Well, I would not want a lot of four word expletives – I’d find them tiresome and some of my followers might find them offensive.

WordPress says not approving increases the likelihood of spam, but the spam filter seems to be very good at picking those up and getting rid of them. I suppose if a lot of meaningless spam began to appear I’d have to think again, but hopefully this won’t happen.

To my mind, if comments are to have any value then they shouldn’t be subject to whether I ‘approve’ of them or not.

So now they are not.