A little housekeeping issue that needs to be discussed.  Comments here require a real email address.  They aren’t going to appear without one, unless I go into the control room and manually approve them.  I do this from time to time, but I can’t guarantee that it will happen or when. 

Just today, one commenter (with a great comment) listed the email address as [email protected].  Cute but unhelpful.  And [email protected] is not as cute but equally unhelpful.  Your email doesn’t show up in the comment, but it is required for your comment to post.  That’s just how it works.

Why, Greenfield?  Why, why?  A few reasons.  First, to eliminate spam comments, always a problem.  As Simple Justice became more popular, we became a target for spammers with literally hundreds of trackbacks and spam comments daily.  But the robots can’t input the code, and the human spammers don’t want me to know who they are. 

Second, there are some nuts out there.  They leave some very unpleasant comments.  In one instance, there was a commenter who was stalking another commenter, and left some very nasty stuff about them in a comment.  Not in my home, you don’t. 

But what about my 1st Amendment rights, Greenfield?  I want my rights!  Well, the government is prohibits (sometimes) from interfering with your right to free speech, but I’m most definitely not the government.  You have no 1st Amendment rights here.  It just doesn’t apply.

A while back, one of my favorite blawgers, Susan Cartier Leibel,  told me that if I insisted on only playing by my rules here, I would end up playing alone.  But my purpose is different from Susan’s, who uses her blog to market her business.  If no one wants to play by my rules, then I’ll play by myself (It’s not like it’s never happened before). 

Now all of this is about including a real email in the little box that says “email required.”  You don’t have to use your real name.  Everyone is entitled to be a coward, if they want (only partially kidding).  But when it says that a real email is required, that’s what it means.  There’s a little guy inside my computer who personally checks every email address, and if it’s not real (or not yours), he knows.

Most of the anonymous comments are awfully good, and I would very much like to make sure that they see daylight.  So include your real email address in your comments so that they make it onto the screen.  As Dan Quayle tried to say, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.  So don’t be a potato(e)-head and spend all that time writing a brilliant comment only to have it fall into the spam box.

Thank you.