Several readers have asked why I haven’t implemented a comments policy sooner. I’ve been taking this one step at a time. I didn’t require the scramble word verification until we started getting spam posts. And I didn’t enable comment moderation until we started getting abusive posts. Arguably I’ve let this one go longer than I should have, especially considering that there are kids that read this. But it’s time. It’s not fair to have a few people (ok, mostly one) change the tenor of the site.

I won’t go back and remove previous comments which had been allowed, but from this point forward the policy below will be enforced for all comments. (The policy now also appears in the pane at the right of each blog page.) This policy is consistent with many other commercial and private blogs. My expectation is that this will be no impact to most of you. The only difference you will see is that comments will not post immediately, but should generally post sometime that day. Comments will never be edited for content. If they don’t meet the policy they will simply be deleted.

Comments Policy — Comments will never be censored based on political or ideological point of view. However, comments will be deleted that are abusive, off-topic, use excessive foul language, or include ad hominem attacks. Comments are pre-moderated, meaning they will not be posted immediately.

For those of you subjected to previous personal attacks, my apologies for not doing this sooner. We will now return to a more civil discussion.