[Brajeshwar]

I understand your sentiments about comments but as someone who have been on the receiving end there are two fights that I don't want to deal with;

1. SPAM. They will find a way to do it. Not even automated, employed cheap labor just spamming blog comments.

2. The extreme hatred and scorn from people who spew venom from behind their anonymous screen names.

Not just me as a person but my family had been threatened (on my blog comments). Not worth the effort, I have done away with the thousands of comments my blog had collected since 2001. A lot of them were nostalgic, sweet, and many a friends, colleagues, co-founders, and girlfriends were the result of comments on my blog but now -- NOT worth my time.

[fxtentacle]

Fully agree. A company I work with used to receive about 1 SPAM message per hour. They kind of outcrowded any actual customer request in the INBOX. And to me, most of them looked like they were hand-written by people with English as a 2nd language. We tried a lot of CAPTCH providers and similar things, but that didn't help. It wasn't automated robot SPAM.

What did move the needle, in the end, was blocking all IPs from India. A bit heavy-handed, maybe, but it was a small company with only local customers anyway.

[nly]

Then why blog? Comments are what distinguish a blog from an online magazine.