Do you moderate comments on your blog?

Yes, I do moderate comments..

Mainly I remove Phone numbers.. As in my subject many times users mention phone number in Public view.. Since I dont have way to verify the number belonging to whom, so I do edit and remove that !!!

I can see how that makes sense. But I see a lot of personal bloggers, writing their own stories, essays who moderate comments. I am less inclined to leave a comment when I have to key in a lot of data just to be able to have a conversation.

Isn't it easier to just go in on a regular basis and remove the abusive and the spammy in one go? I must say I don't remember how Blogger/Blogspot handles comments. But on Wordpress I can see all comments (across all posts) in one list. I can then select and delete the spammy ones in one shot.

Also, Wordpress's Akismet does a pretty good job of detecting spam, so it is a lot easier.

But really, my concern is that with readers so hard to come by, why drive the the marginals away from the door by making them pay a "cover charge".

If you are worried about spam, just ad one captcha verification.. but in anyway comments are hard to come by, I tend to keep them easy to use !!

No - I'm not worried about spam. Aksimet has done a wonderful job over the last couple of years.

I don't like to create any roadblocks for commenters. I mean I get, what, 10-20 visitors per day. I average about 1% of visitors leave a comment. Why make it harder?

I get a few more than that, but I have set my comment settings to WP Default which seems to push most of the comment into moderation unless same user is commenting twice.. I have zero tolerance for spam..

Although I find users posting twice or thrice finding the comment is not visible but still i prefer this way and approve manually !!

So there is a road block, rather speed breaker in my blog.. one has to wait a few hours till I come online to approve the comments..

No I don't.  But then I don't have too many comments.

Well, neither do I. The most I've ever got on a single post is 20 something and then some of them are mine as part of a back and forth, so really.

20 comments on one post?! I probably do not have much more than 20 comments on my entire blog of 350+ posts!

Regardless, I never moderate my comments and do not place any obstacles (CAPTCHA) to writing a comment. I allow marketers to place links in the comments, and one reader made a somewhat-negative comment. To the latter I simply replied with rational reasons for writing as I did. If someone were to write personally abusive comments then I might delete it. In general though, I encourage people to comment at my blog.

I recently learned, however, that Blogger has instiuted the CAPTCHA program for readers who are not logged into a Google account and who want to write a comment.

Micky, I read your blog, will be back to comment sometime today.

May I suggest: break the long posts up into smaller pieces. Long pieces intimidate the readers. Not me, I love reading. But the bulk of the people out there struggle.

Another thought: I do care about the quality of the readers and those who comment and have regular conversations with me. I really do not appeal to the "contest / brand / voucher" focused people, because they are writers for money and do not read. Well, most of them don't I believe. My blog is not going to be read by them. I have managed to pick up 3-4 regulars and slowly adding more.

Yes, Ajesh, that is good advice and I do follow it, believe it or not.

As a writer, I love to write and as a reader, I love to read, although I have found that posts of 2,000+ words present an obstacle to me, unless I am fascinated with the author or topic (due to my voracious need to write and to read a great variety of articles). When I began my blog, I would write whatever I wanted to write, regardless of length. Now, I try to limit the posts to no more than 2,000 words, and to break up a post if it can be done logically and thematically. I have a great many recent posts that have been split up, and I have even written a few two-part film reviews.

My recent Fifth Flag post (at over 5,600 words!) was, in fact, split up into 4 posts! About two months ago, I had a 2-part PT post in which introduced the concept of flags. I then continued with my more recent Fifth Flag post, and the Sixth Flag post (which was broken off from my already-long Fifth Flag post). Theoretically and thematically, I could have broken the Fifth Flag post into four posts, but then that would have broken down the theme of "flags".

I suppose that writing is always a balancing act.

Yeah - it's a tough one. I broke my epic Nepal trip into parts, for two reasons. 1. Leave them hanging on the edge of a crisis in each episode to make them come back

2. I knew it was going to be a long story.

It ended up over 8000 words and I think I could easily have gone on to make it even longer.

I'm doing the same thing with the Paris trip. So many bloggers encapsulate a 2 week trip into one post of less than 1,000 words, I wonder if they actually absorbed anything at all from what they saw. They certainly don't offer a personal perspective, but stick to the traditional oohs and aahs.

I guess that's why they have many more readers than I do

I would suggest that no post should be more than 1500 words and episodes should be broken down logically with hooks to keep them interested. It has worked for me to some extent. Especially as in the Hello World story, which was broken down into 3 bits.