Comments on this site have been a pain since I enabled them about 2 1/2 years ago. I believe I enabled them due to something some judgmental person said when they couldn’t comment on an article I had written. During the first year, there was a lot of fine tuning the spam blocking to try and keep out the spammy crap. That continues to be a work in progress, but it seems to be in pretty good shape.
During those couple of years I ended up racking up a queue of about 7,000 in the spam category and another 2,000+ in the pending category (which meant I need to deal with them). I was dealing with comments every day, but I’d miss a few and it built up over the course of a couple of years. Tonight, I either addressed or cleared out all but 17. My database is much happier. The 17 remaining are thoughtful questions and require thoughtful answers, so I’ll get to them when I have time to provide such an answer.
In the meantime, note that now that it’s all cleaned up, if there are any comments, feel free to post and I should actually respond at this point… Sorry for being latent on those up ’till now.