Blog comments

As some of you may have noticed, I'm having trouble with my comment page.  Even though I have a spam filter, sometimes half of the comments on a post are by anonymous commentators who seem to be selling something or want people to visit their website.  It is disappointing to see 10 blog comments in the box and then go and find five of them spam.  I daily go to my settings page and delete comments awaiting moderation on back posts because all of those are spam too.  There are usually about 10 a day on back posts.  And then in the spam filter there are at least 30 or 40 spam comments that got caught.   (The first time I realized that I could clean out the spam filter there were over 2000!  It took quite awhile to clean out everything even in groups of 100.)

So I've put a moderation filter on the present posts now.  I guess what that means is that I will be able to delete the comments before they get onto the blog... but that doesn't really solve the problem of not letting them in to begin with.  I suppose I could change the filter to just registered commentators or not allowing anonymous comments at all but there are quite a few of you who remain anonymous but have wonderful advice or interesting experiences that you tell me about.  So I don't really want to do that...  And I've never liked that word verification option.

Anyway, you may notice a difference in the comment box (but I'm not sure what is supposed to change).  If anyone has any other advice I'd sure like to hear it.

And now I have a question.  I got a pop-up message saying that Google Reader is going to be cancelled from July (I think... It only popped up once.)  I have always used Google Reader to visit blog friends and the blogs I visit are registered there.  I don't even know if there are other ways to keep a list of blogs and to show when the blogger has posted (and how many I've fallen behind in reading.)  Could someone direct me to a new website that does this?

All these small annoyances put me in a bad mood.   Grrr...  Cats!  You all had better be careful of me today!