The other day a questionable comment was posted on my site. WordPress gives you a ton of options for how to handle comments. If I checked the right boxes and unchecked the wrong ones, then I have it set up so that when a user makes his or her first-ever comment, I must approve that comment and, in effect, approve that user. From that point on, the user may post comments freely without my approval. However, I still have the power — via the WordPress Dashboard — to delete any comment (or post).
The comment in question included a username, but the username was a the URL to a website’s homepage. The URL the user entered as his URL was a specific page on that website. And the entire content of the comment was text copied and pasted from that specific page.
If I assume that the mysterious poster had no malevolent intentions, then I have to call him out for not understanding 1) the forms he had to fill out to use my site, and 2) how to give the source website its due credit. Personally, when I reference a website’s article, I paste the article name into the body of my post, then use the URL of the article as the link of the text. That way it seems to me that I am making it very clear where I got something.
The fact is that I don’t think the user was clueless. I suspect that this a case of comment spam. But I don’t know for sure.
Ultimately, the fact that the user did not include a real nickname/username, did not include a URL, and did not include an email address, he did not provide me with any way to contact him or verify the sincerity of his post. In light of this, I have determined that it is my policy to delete comments left by seemingly anonymous posters.
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