Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

People can register on my personal blog. They can do so to avoid seeing the Google Ads to the left. They can do so if they want to submit comments. However: there are some hurdles to take before you're registered. First you have to enter the Captcha correctly; then you have to wait until I manually approve you.

Mail-addresses consisting of a series of seemingly random characters followed by mail.ru or 163.com have very little chance of being approved. The same goes for people who use one name as a login (like goforpalin) and then a completely different gmail address. The general idea is: you need to be a real person when you submit something to my site, so I expect a loginname and mail-address that looks like the login and mail of a real person. For instance: a person named Alfred Alston wanted to register (using his name in the login as well as in his e-mail address). A quick search taught me that there are different people named Alfred Alston. So I approved the account, and filed Alfred as a 'person unknown to Bruno.'

There's a difference between 'persons known to Bruno' and 'persons unknown to Bruno.' The former can post comments that aren't moderated; the latter need their comments to be approved by me. That's where it often goes wrong. I approve somebody with an account that looks as if there's a real person behind it, and the next thing I know is that this person posts SPAM on my site. Most of the time, they pick an old blog post, and they create a comment with a link to 'Prada Shoes', 'Cheap Viagra', etc...

I don't remember what Alfred Alston did, but I do remember that I had to remove a similar comment a while ago. Since that day, somebody has been using the name Alfred Alston on a very regular basis, trying to create an account. That's not going to happen. You're free to post an opinion here (if you survive all the hurdles), but I won't accept SPAM. Is that understood?