This is the post I really didn’t want to write.

It seems there is a sickness invading the blogging world of Warcraft. It’s the same sickness we’ve been fighting since about the second week of retail release: Gold sellers and solicitors.  Several bloggers have brought it up before me, but two of the most prominent are Matticus and Big Bear Butt. Feel free to follow the links, and return here or not.

Thanks for coming back.   I’m going to keep the linkage to a minimum here; Matt & BBB have documented thoroughly, and I see no point in simply paraphrasing them. However, I do want you, my readers, to know what I have done to minimize the possibility of offensive comments showing up here.

Because my blogging platform is WordPress, I’m able to use Akismet to catch almost all spam. To my knowledge, not one single spam comment has made it through Akismet’s filter. There have been a couple false positives, and I’ve cleared them, but I haven’t had one of those in months.

I also have WordPress set up to require me to approve the initial comment of anyone who’d like to leave a comment on any of my articles. As any blogger will tell you, comments are our drug of choice. Every single one that appears is just like winning the roll on a green, blue, or purple in the game. Because of that, I’d like nothing better than to have every comment that makes it through Akismet, appear on the site immediately. But I have more respect for you than to do that, because then you WOULD be assaulted by crap you didn’t come here to read (and unfortunately, not just gold spam). 

Today for instance, I disapproved three comments from the same person that were in the queue. Yes, there was a blog linked, but it was in broken English, one post, saying more coming soon. The comments added nothing to any of the discussions to which they were attached. I smelled a trap (and I’m probably opening myself up by discussing this so openly, but hey…as BRK says, that’s the way I roll): Get an innocuous comment approved, and then you can spam all you like! (Well, until the first spam message, at which point you DO get locked out.)

So if there’s a link, I follow it. If it’s a blog, it needs to be a legitimate one. Many are to guild sites (one from Scandinavia today–Finland I think, but I can’t swear to it, and I digress). Some are just e-mail links. But as long as they have something semi-constructive to say, I let ‘em in, as long as Akismet says they’re okay.

So basically, I’m saying this site is as safe as I can make it, with respect to your reading pleasure. You may not like what I have to say sometimes, and you may disagree with comments here, but I don’t ever want you disappointed that you clicked away from here to a site you really had no intention of visiting.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get some gnomish & goblin engineers to work together to design a special level of Hell for gold sellers, buyers, and spammers.