Today I took the fateful step of adding the following strings to our comments blacklist:

• .info
• hometown.aol.com
• geocities.com

To my mind, using a “.info” domain is like walking up to a bank wearing a ski mask. Sure, you might have perfectly innocent intentions, but you should not be offended if the guard locks the door.

Like most blogs, the Gleeson Bloglomerate is constantly bombarded with comment spam. Every single day, we receive perhaps a dozen legitimate comments, and tens of thousands of illegitimate ones. In the time it took me to write this sentence, we got another 50 or so. That’s just par for the course.

When you comment here, your comment goes into “moderation,” meaning we will look at it at our convenience, and approve it for publication, if it is not spam, or obscene, or otherwise offensive. If you have ever had a previous comment approved here, your new comments will bypass moderation and be published immediately.

And then there’s the “blacklist.” Think of it as a list of “naughty words,” or certain sequences of letters which no legitimate comment should contain. It’s not quite as restrictive as you might imagine; for instance, if you have something to say about “Cialis,” your comment won’t be blacklisted. But if you say “Buy Cialis online,” it will.

Blacklisted comments never make it to moderation. They are deleted right away, and we never see them. Since we just don’t have time to look at 10,000 comments to approve the ten real ones, the blacklist is necessary.

Please note, the blacklist will clobber your comment if you include these strings at all, even if it’s just to say, “I agree with you about the .info domain.” You will not be blacklisted if you write “dot info” or “. info” (with a space after the dot).

In the two years this blog has been up, we have never gotten a bona fide comment containing a “.info” URL, or a “hometown.aol.com” site. We have gotten exactly two legitimate comments containing Geocities URLs: this one and this one, just so you know.

Balanced against the thousands of spammers using these domains and sending us comments, it was not a tough decision. Still, it was a heartbreaker, since I know some nice folks really do use those domains.

If you have a real non-spam website which for some reason is stuck in a Geocities or .info or AOL domain, you are of course still free to comment here; you just can’t include your URL is all. Sorry. Had to be done.