I do intend to improve the visibility, although it should be noted that not every one of my posts gets this many comments.

Engtech mentioned the same thing on the Akismet post and Rob just above.

This is something that will be fixed very soon

I had to implement this quickly due to manual spam on a certain topic that was becoming annoying, and making it through Spam Karma on definitely hit a few email boxes.

Great Idea – but I think I know why your comments policy form isn’t read much. It’s not at all well linked to within actual posts.

Many people visiting will land on an actual post page, rather than the home page – thus it’s really not that evident you have any policy at all..

Have you considered replacing the ‘missing form’ with a suitably sized “Can’t see a comment form? Perhaps you should read the Comment Policy first..” – at present it’s buried at the very top of the comments.. again there is an assumption folks will read an entire page of content. Few actually will.

It’s a great idea – but you need to make sure people can easily gain access to the policy page.. otherwise it will frustrate many who have valid comments and they’ll simply not comment.

I actually had to switch this on earlier than I expected because one spam message actually got through and emailed to people a day or so back, which is extremely annoying.

I hope this blocks manual spam a little more.

One small thing. I had to click back to the home page to find the link to the comments policy. Might be more user friendly if the link to it was included in the !$cookie message.

On the other hand I have seen a trend in the comments on a number of blogs over the last few days that many people wouldn’t adopt dofollow because of the “nice post” comments.

Lots of bloggers leave those types of comments unmoderated, because in some ways they are social proof, but for anyone subscribing to comments it becomes aggravating to see updates all the time with junk.

If it proves successful, it is going to be great for people who have a number of blogs where they don’t want to spend time pulling comments out of the moderation queue, or where they would prefer subscribers to comments to not be burdened by junk.

By the “Post a Comment” headline just above the comment box it should say something like

You last read the comments policy on February 15th – 4:09 am

Comments will soon be automatically switched off for people who have not read my comments policy – thanks for taking the time, it is appreciated.

Was that what I was supposed to see?