Thanks for explaining. You must have had quite a time investment clearing all the comments in the last four months, a hat tip to you, you seem to be a busy man besides the web site.

The problem with spam and comments on BtB is about to be solved at last. I found a new software guy, who is in the process of cleaning up and upgrading the website. For the past four months in order to make the spam situation manageable, I have had to close comments on any posts after three weeks. This is one reasons the threads no longer last as long.

We should have these fixes ready in about a week, when we will switch to them. The website will then change somewhat, but not radically. At that time, comments will hopefully return to what they were before. There will be one change which also should not hinder commenters significantly, and will likely improve things greatly. I will no longer have to approve each comment, but before a comment is accepted the commenter will have to fill out a Captcha box. This is not very hard, and will prevent spam from reaching the site.

I ask because I have noticed that posters are not able, under what appears to be this new system, to interact as directly as before which causes the conversation threads to be very shallow. I know that you have your subject and trolling dislikes and standards but it seems to have caused a dilution of the intensity of the conversation here.

I remember not long ago participating in a conversation thread that was about 62 comments deep. Now, if there are two or three comments that seems to be a lot.