The World According to Oatney

Notes on comments

I received a call this morning from my good friend Ray Foret, who left me a message complaining about the fact that I reinstituted the graphical security interface in my comments after having removed that security interface. Ray rightly pointed out that the interface is inaccessable to blind readers, and he is correct. As a person with a disability myself, I dislike it immensely when things are left inaccessable to me and they don't have to be, and dislike is just a nice term for how I really feel about it.

I did attempt to take the interface off of comments. The experiment lasted all of two days. This blog became so spammed with comments (nearly all of them to older posts) that I had to spend over an hour just cleaning spam off this web log. None of it was explicit stuff, but it was pretty contaminated, and the explicit stuff would come soon enough.

We are getting a lot of new readers here at the World thanks to our being linked with some other prominent East Tennessee bloggers. I am sure some of those newbies might want to read or listen to some of my old stuff from our days in the Queen City. I don't particularly want them to have to endure comment spam when they do this. I am most concerned, however, for those who might find a post through Google or the Blogger search engine. Many of these people could be children or teenagers. I know some people have found this place that way in the past.
The last thing I want is a 13-year old from Crossville who is interested in politics or the Catholic faith or something else I have talked about here finding one of my comments and finding below it some filth that I did not put there. I am determined that this will not happen.

Ray did suggest that blind readers and others with a disability could send comments privately to my e-mail and I could post them here.

I agree with this, and I want to encourage blind and disabled readers to do this. I want to assure you that even if I do not agree with your comments, they will be posted here.

I just can't afford, for the sake of keeping this blog well-read and respected, to allow spam on this site.

posted by Deacon David Oatney @ 9:57 AM