Since the entire purpose of this endeavor is to precipitate a public dialogue, I presume that will sometimes mean dialogue among readers here on this site and, sometimes, even dialogue with me. Hence, I have enabled public comments and invite your participation.
However, I reserve the right delete posts I find insulting, abusive, offensive, way off-point, redundant, or generally misanthropic. And, if it gets out-of-hand, I’ll have to fall back to a moderated format. So please be polite and succinct. If the commentary thread on a particular item gets too long to follow easily (high hopes?) I may also try to cull duplicate arguments and extranea to keep it manageable.
Also, note that this is not the kind of blog that is updated many times per day, or even every day (or every week). I actually have a real (and fairly complicated) life beyond this cyber domicile and, so, it may not always be possible for me to respond even if it seems appropriate. However, I promise I will try.
If you would rather respond to an article privately, e-mail feedback directly to kotf at LowellTaylor dot com. I apologize for not making it easy with a pretty contact form or cut-and-paste address. Alas, that just invites more SPAM…
Update, 19 January 2006: This morning’s batch of comment SPAM was 144 messages inviting viewers (I surmise — they are written in some kind of Lewis Carroll Wonderland language that leaves an overall impression without ever actually saying anything coherent) to partake of extreme online gaming. From general experience with such things on this site I suspect that batch was only the beginning for today.
Unfortunately this has become rather the rule than the exception, and I’m spending an inordinate amount of time weeding these interlopers out. As a result I’ve had to tighten my SPAM filters quite a bit, and they now reject a lot of stuff out of hand rather than dumping everything suspicious into my in-box for a manual review. Alas, that means that an occasional legitimate item may get thrown out with all the junk. I apologize for that, and truly regret the need for such blunt instruments.
If a comment you’ve posted never shows up, it may have fallen victim to the SPAM filter. In that case, please use the feedback mechanism to e-mail it to me directly (the e-mail uses a different SPAM filter) so I can post it for you.
Update, 6 March 2018: In the last two weeks I have received over 1600 comments on the article I posted about the roots of the American civil war — exactly none of which had anything to do with the actual article. Hence, I have resorted to moderating the comments. The rule I’ve put into place is that, once I’ve allowed a comment to appear, other comments from the same author will not require moderation and can appear immediately. But the first comment anyone posts will always come to me for moderation before showing up on the site. It’s not what I want, but it’s what seems to be required in our inconsiderate era…
© Copyright 2018, Augustus P. Lowell