The responses I'm getting are simply ridiculous at times and I'm tired of the threats, bad grammar, and overall low quality of content other peoples' comments reduce my blog to.

Some comments have led me to notify law enforcement organizations across the globe and has gotten a class B range owned by a Canadian ISP banned from coming to my site unless they remove the offender of their TOS from their network (the ISP responded this morning saying that the user is gone).

It sucks but it's the way things go. People are rude and often stupid. They say things before they think of what they're doing. It's even worse because some people TYPE things before they think about what they're doing.

I'll probably be writing an article about this subject sometime this week.

Do most readers have their own blogs? I don't and I visit OTB nearly every day. I have sometimes thought that blogs are a club for members only (with OTB and a few others as an exception). Which is absolutely fine, I firmly believe in any community making its own rules, except that most seem to invite "the non-blogging public" to participate. This sends a mixed message if the bloggers really prefer we read only and otherwise keep quiet.

Bloggers could set up forums as a "we don't manage the comments here" and thoroughly notify its visitors that this is a "freedom of speech and stupidity" zone.

Set up some of your best readers/commenters as moderators (or have no moderators at all) and let it rip.

I have a friend who is implementing an MT to phpBB plugin that makes all comments to blog entries get placed in a new thread in a forum category.

Perhaps this is a solution to be considered.

I've had some issues with commenters on TCP from making insulting remarks to me for what I choose to post to displaying the worst that partisanship has to offer. They have however, been a great way for readers to forward me stories I otherwise would have missed. Not that comments are necessarily needed to do that, but it's still been valuable.

As part of the larger comments vs. "blog it" debate, there are some commenters out there who show no interest in blogging (including one who comments on my site, Tacitus, Obsidian Wings, and Winds of Change quite often who stopped blogging and now only comments). They may or may not be the argument for keeping comments, but they're a valuable consideration for me.

Plus, it's too confusing to try to hope from blog to blog to have the same conversation when comments are available.

So, at second thoughts, a forum-like solution might be the better choice...

And, of course, I'll bet the read-only people are a significant percentage of the most thoughtful commenters.

Also, I would have to be motivated to follow trackbacks, even on posts I like; it's just more trouble.

Up to a certain size of blog, the policy of having readers just "report" out-of-line comments could help. Probably not for something the size of Command Post, though. Nor OTB, for that matter.

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