Despite my difficulties learning how to spell it, I’m experimenting with using the third-party commenting platform Disqus to manage comments here. 

Although commenting might appear to be a technically simple aspect of maintaining a blog — name, email, text, blamo — it’s the defense against the ever-widening torrent of blog spam that’s the complicated part. I’ve experimented with everything here — reCAPTCHA, Mollom, Akismet, Defensio — and although they do variously capable jobs at filtering out the spam, they also make the user experience of commenting suffer because of the delays involved in the spam-catching-and-filtering.

So I’m going to experiment with letting someone else have a go for a while.

Please let me know (in the comments, of course) whether this works better for you in the readership; if it looks like Disqus is a good replacement for Drupal’s built-in commenting, I’ll work at migrating the 20,000+ comments that have flowed in over the years into the Disqus archive.