Comments No More

Well, the time has come...to shut down post comments. Presumably for good.

When I rebooted the site in Drupal a couple of years back, I'd waffled over whether or not to leave post comments enabled. It seemed like an okay idea, but at the same time would they just become a sea of comment spam? At the time of the site reboot, though, I chose not to maintain an active direct contact ("contact us") form due to other technical limitations at the time. So comments seemed an appropriate balance.

Reader: I can assure you that after some ~30 months, my verdict is clear: a sea of comment spam.

I don't actively point a lot of folks in this direction, and when I do it's typically via a different medium. And as such, follow-up and/or dialogue is primarily handled in direct messages or through other avenues, not the site's comment [threading] mechanism. This has been bolstered by the fact that I've yet to approve a single non-spam comment since the reboot in very early 2019.

A few months ago, I managed to address the underlying technical issues with the contact form (this was primarily DMARC-related, but there were other wonky things), and I now have much more deliberate anti-spam controls for that mechanism. And so, with zero remorse, I have disabled the comment form.

I will not miss the several dozen comment spam submissions each day. If you're one of those folks to post comments for communication, I salute you (and apologize).