The role of moderation in blogging

Help please.

I’m just looking for pointers here. Most of the time, I use my power (?) of moderation to get rid of splog and spam, and to ensure that material that could be considered generally offensive is kept off. Occasionally, I’ve had to remove comments that were essentially off-topic, driving the conversation somewhere way beyond “a blog about information”. These comments (and there have been a handful) tended to move very quickly from information to freedom of speech to human rights, and focus more on the human rights aspect than on information. And my gut feel was that, while these were valid topics for discussion, they were not what Confused of Calcutta was about. I went with my gut.

Somewhere deep inside my head, I guess I felt that comments needed to be related directly to the post rather than meander away into the wild blue yonder. Yet serendipitous connections are an essential aspect of blogging.
Did I do right? Who else has faced this, and what can I learn from this?

Let me know what you think

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.