If you don’t blog, you might be surprised by how many spam comments show up every day. (These are automatically generated comments with no content beyond “Loved this post”, together with an attempt to get you to click through to the commenter’s web site.) I use the phenomenally great (and free!!!) software Akismet to snag these comments before they ever get through, and it’s amazingly accurate, though every once in a while there’s a false positive. That is, sometimes a legitimate comment gets tagged as spam (often because it contains a lot of links but sometimes for no apparent reason). So every now and then, I look through the spam folder and rescue those comments, if any.
But a moment ago, I hit a wrong button and permanently deleted 200 spam comments (all generated within the past few hours!) before I’d looked at them. Statistically, there was probably nothing legit in there anyway. But if by chance I threw your baby out with my bathwater, I do apologize — and please try again.
Landsburg, you really do provide a public service here. And if you ever feel beleaguered by all the snippy posts complaining about this or that shortcoming, comfort yourself with the idea that there are legions of people who really do share your views out there. And that they regularly want to express their support in the simplest way they know how. And that you’d know this if you hadn’t just flushed their simple, heart-felt messages down the toilet.
Hope that lifts your mood today.