Today Alas, a Blog has a discussion thread for “feminists only.” It’s an interesting concept, attempting to enforce rules on a blog discussion. It’s not that all blogs don’t have at least some level of rules. For example, John Scalzi has an extensive set of rules for posting comments, which he does indeed enforce. Generally sets of rules such as this are designed to encourage civil conversation, to make a blog a more pleasant place for all who visit there.

It’s true, if someone is uncivil to me in an online conversation, I tend to be uncivil right back at them. The problem can spiral out of control rather quickly (and there are many commenters who are much less restrained than I am). On the other hand, really agitated comment threads like those at Political Animal can be fun, too. I like the lawless (or self-policing, depending on your perspective) atmosphere of a forum like that, at least sometimes.

Alas, a Blog is another place where the discussion can be very intense, as conservative trolls try to agitate a liberal haven. Alas’s politics are well to the left of mine, but I’d still consider myself a feminist. I wonder if the readers of “Alas” would. Indeed, most of the comments currently on the feminist-only thread are discussing the ground rules: can men be feminists? should we really have rules like this? I wonder if they’ll ever get around to discussing what they’re hoping to discuss.

Spam, of course, is a separate issue. While everyone experiences e-mail spam, and frequent blog-readers are aware of the spam issues in blog comments, those who don’t blog themselves may not understand how frustrating it can be to the bloggers. In a typical day, Word Munger gets, maybe, 2 or 3 legitimate comments. However, during a spam attack, I might receive 200 or more spam comments. Mine tend to be oriented towards poker. I have no compunction whatsoever against removing these comments immediately, and most other bloggers are with me.

Trackback spam is the newest form: instead of adding your ad to the comments, you create a blog entirely for the purpose of spamming. Then you link to other blogs that have enabled the “trackback” feature (as I have), and you’ll show up in the comments thread (or sometimes a separate trackback thread). Jane Galt was recently subjected to such a massive trackback attack that she decided to disable trackback entirely.

I can see why blogs might be tempted to do such a thing, but I’ve found trackback to be a great way to find new blogs: the people who link to blogs I like are also likely to write blogs I like (if they’re not spammers, that is). I wish bloggers like would seek ways to combat trackback spam, instead of just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

We can only hope the anti-feminists don’t start trackback spamming Alas, a Blog, or perhaps we’ll lose a valuable feature of that blog as well.