I've decided to deal with comment spam by closing commenting on any post too old to show up on the main page, and by not allowing HTML in comments from now on.
I'm also starting a policy of deleting any comment that does not contain any discussion of the post it is attached to. Any posters who just say "Great site" will be deleted. I'm tired of people using flattery just to put up a link to their site.
And regarding the discussion: I don't mind people attacking my point of view, in fact, I love it. But the language has to be civil, without name-calling. Ad hominem arguments will be deleted.
My apologies to those of you who got trackback pings due to me resaving some old posts.