I have continued to look into how to manage moderation on this blog.<\/p>\n
To do so, I looked at data on the number of comments over the last year.<\/p>\n
They have, in total, been 358,000 published comments on this blog over a period of 20 years, but 20% of all traffic in this blog's 20-year history occurred last year, meaning there were likely around 71,000 comments here last year.<\/p>\n
Some comments are, of course, quite short, which is most especially true of mine, on average, except when I need to comment at length, which I felt the need to do quite often.<\/p>\n
However, even with the new 400-word comment limit, many approach that length and even if I assume that the average comment is only of 50 words, which is likely to be an under estimate, this means that there were in total 3.5 million words posted as comments on this blog last year, all of which I read, and some of which I write.<\/p>\n
On average, non-fiction books in the UK are around 70,000 words.<\/p>\n
That means that there were at least 50 books' worth of comments on this blog last year, and I responded to a fair number of them, which takes longer than reading them.<\/p>\n
It is this that has become the issue that I now need to manage. The growth in blog traffic is what has created the problem that now needs to be addressed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"