Island of Doubtful commenters

I am pleased that activity on the Island of Doubt has increased in recent months. I manage to squeeze in a hour four or five days a week to write about what I think is the most serious public policy challenge of our time, and make what modest contribution I can to the debate, and I wish I could do more.

Indeed, I wish I could devote my entire working day to his blog. But I can't. I have to make a living and income for this blog covers little more than my DSL bill. So monitoring the comments on a hourly basis is out of the question. Until recently, that hasn't been a big problem. But the unfortunate reality is the increased traffic has resulted in a much lower signal-to-noise ratio in the comments.

I don't have the time to babysit, and evaluate each comment on its merits. So I have introduced commenter registration. For those who are still interested in taking part in the discussion here, and making mature contributions, I hope you will make the effort to register and do me the honor of continuing to visit and offering your thoughts. In turn, I will make a real effort to ensure anyone who abuses the privilege is tossed off the island.

More like this

The "whither twitter" debate is irrelevant. Evidence hinting that its popularity may be short-lived is not hard to find, but I wouldn't place any money on it either way. It's just too hard to predict what will take hold in the ever-shifting sands of the semi-arid intellectual desert that some still…
The reliably poignant Ben Goldacre explores the declining signal-to-noise ratio in the scientific press through a recent paper that tentatively suggests ejaculation could be "a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males." This is to get your attention, as it apparently did. But his…
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean is pondering comment policies: So the question is: how can the comment sections be better? To decode this for our more innocent readers: how can we increase the signal-to-noise ratio? Increasing the signal is one obvious way, but that's hard. The real question that I'…
I have nothing to do with the recent kerfuffle about civility and comment policies that has been meandering through science blogs, but a large quantity of posts on the subject on a largeish number of blogs has, I admit, gotten me thinking about my own comment policies. Since I often get queries,…