Cafe Hayek Blog Closes Comments Section

Mark Thoma makes me aware of shifts in TypePad, and sends me to Bob Lawless: Comments, Spam, Loyal Readers, and False Positives - Credit Slips: The many interesting comments left by our informed readership help make Credit Slips one of the best places on the Internet for informed discussion about debt and bankruptcy issues. The many spam comments make Credit Slips a less useful resource.

Bob Lawless at Credit Slips says what I was going to say: Comments, Spam, Loyal Readers, and False Positives: ...

I’m in Munich, for the DLD conference, where Ben Horowitz took the opportunity to introduce the Rap Genius guys to the European digital-media crowd. But it’s actually Horowitz’s partner, Marc Andreessen, who has the best explanation of what the investment is all about:

AUTHORS tend to like "best of" lists that rank publications in various categories. If your site makes the list, you feel grand. If it doesn't, well, they're clearly using some bizarre criteria no one cares about, and anyway someone else is always publishing some other set of rankings some of which include you which obviously means they're the correct ones.

The spam filter seems to be catching a few more legitimate comments than usual recently. I just rescued about nine comments (out of over one hundred messages flagged as spam) from the last several days. Some of those comments were from some of our most regular commenters. I know that if you put in a lot of links your comment is more likely to be flagged. Besides that I don’t really know what it is looking for.

NPR had a segment today on Nobel economist Hayek, with some commentary from Cafe Hayek's Don Boudreaux.

Ross Stores, Inc. (ROST) October 06, 2011 8:30 am ET Executives John G. Call - Chief Financial Officer, Principal Accounting Officer and Senior Vice President Presentation John G. Call