The first requirement is that all comments must be polite. We are civilized here at the roundtable and we respect our fellow men and women. I trust that roundtable readers are intelligent enough to express their points without the use of personal insults or profanity.
The second requirement is that all comments must be at least remotely related to the subject under discussion. I have a very liberal view of this. In other words, so long as the comment is not spam, it is probably fine.
I used to allow anyone to comment with no restriction, but found myself spending hours every week battling comment spam. Therefore, I have employed two anti-spam strategies. One, after a post gets old (currently set at two weeks, but I may adjust this), the ability to leave comments is automatically turned off for that post. Two, those who wish to comment must register at TypeKey.
TypeKey is a third-party service with very strict privacy rules (that is, they will not give your information to anyone else). I understand that this step may dissuade some people from commenting, but this is a better solution than my wasting hours each week fighting spam. The nice thing about using TypeKey is that you only need to register once and you can use this service to help fight spam across the blogosphere. Any blogger can sign up for the TypeKey service as part of the war on spam.
Verification Test
I had to do what Lucy suggested, also.
The software seems to have some bugs. I clicked the option to allow registered people (those with TypeKey accounts) to post without my needing approval. But I still had to approve all the new comments.
Hopefully the other part of the comment software is working. In theory, now that I've approved your comments, you should be able to post again without my intervention. We'll see.
I'm also disappointed that spammers are still attempting to comment even with the TypeKey system. Fortunately, so long as disapprove of them, they can't get their posts on Solport itself.
Let's see.
Test message. I signed up for a TypeKey account, but my first comment did not work. I then went back to TypeKey and told it to also provide my email address to the sites where I comment. I'm now testing that.