A week without comments on this blog has been a real breath of fresh air. No offense to you, dear readers, but it's been more fun guessing how you are reacting to what I am writing than it is reading what the more vocal of you have to say. Plus, no arguing with people -- very good for the soul. I may make the "comments hiatus" a recurring event.

Anyway, I've thought long and hard over the past week about what my new comments policy should contain. There have been a number of problems with the comments on this blog lately (besides the perennial hassle of spam), and I've been working on a plan to make the troubles go away.

I greatly appreciate the vast majority of comments that my readers have left here. But there are an increasing number of posts that I find inappropriate, and I've decided to take action. Here is what I have come up with. It's probably unnecessarily detailed, and even so it leaves out the obvious prohibitions on incivility, profanity, and defamation. But the executive summary is "Be succinct, be civil, be reasonable":

1. Comments may be no greater than the following maximum lengths: 150 words for a first post by a commenter in a thread, and 50 words for any subsequent post by the same commenter in the same thread. Multiple postings that aren't broken up by a comment by someone else are treated as a single comment for this purpose. If you have more than that to say, you need to have your own blog, to which you can post a simple link in the comments here if you wish.

2. A commenter may comment in no more than one new comment thread per day.

3. Off-topic comments that make the same point that the commenter has previously made on this site are not welcome.

4. Comments that relate to my workplace are strictly prohibited.

5. Comments that make ad hominem remarks about other commenters, or particularly about me, are forbidden.

6. Comments that violate these policies wil be removed. Commenters who repeatedly have their comments removed will be banned from further commenting.

7. I reserve the right to remove any comment or to ban any commenter from commenting, or from accessing this site altogether, for any reason, or for no reason.

8. Please hit the "Post" button only once, and wait. Software and server limitations make the process slow sometimes. Hitting the button again doesn't speed things up; it posts the comments twice, which only I can fix. Multiple copies of the same comment will all be removed.

Comments will reopen with new posts beginning Sunday afternoon. Thanks for your patience and understanding.