Held Hostage by our Blog

While it is true that Dubner and I sometimes feel that we are held hostage by our blog (in the sense that the constant need to provide new content weighs on us), it has never been our intention to hold reader comments hostage.

We had no idea that if a reader comment contained one of hundreds of suspect words (automatically chosen by the software to detect spam), it got held in blog purgatory until one of us approved it. Unfortunately, given the nature of the things we post about, some of the words that got your comment blacklisted were gambling, drugs, poker, etc.

To the best of my limited ability, I have tried to free all of these hostage comments. Now that we know how it works, this shouldn’t be a problem in the future. If you use an offending word, however, your post won’t appear until one of us sees it and approves it.

For the record, there has not been a comment we have attempted to censor since we switched sites. Any post you made that never appeared simply got caught by the software.