by Patrick Copeland

You might not know this but when we started this blog back in January 2007 we were the first at Google to allow readers to comment openly on our posts. We take pride in our goal to participate in the testing community.

This openness is sometimes abused. Lately the volume of comment spam has been on the raise. We have to spend a lot of time playing "whack-a-mole" cleaning it up. It's annoying to our readers and clutters the legitimate discussion.

We've taken the step to moderate comments starting today and will delete spam before you see it. Comments that are clearly spam or are purely promotional in nature will be filtered. The only down side is that comments will have a slight latency getting posted. We will continue to encourage debate and won't censor conflicting or alternative ideas.

Thanks for understanding. And keep up the rich discussion.