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I heard from one of my regular readers that he tried to post a comment only to get a message "Banned by siteowner. Your comment will not be added."

I can only wonder how many other people have gotten the same message and left in a huff or were left hurt and wondering what they had done. But in all the time I've been doing this, I have actually banned precisely one person.

The problem arises because of the way Haloscan manages bans. A while back, there was someone trying to harass me by posting a series of comments consisting of attempts at vile (but ultimately sophomoric) personal attacks with some "I know who you are!" hints sprinkled through. Not surprisingly, this person lacked the guts to use their real IP address. It was always a phony address or it came through an anonymizer.

He hasn't been around for a while; it might be because in his last comment he slipped up and revealed a little too much (which is I say he: I have a pretty damn good idea who it was) or, more likely, he just got bored because I simply deleted every comment immediately upon seeing it without offering a reply and banned the IP address from which it appeared to come.

That's where the problem arises. Haloscan gives you the option of banning a range of addresses. For example, several of the comments came from a domain in the Netherlands whose IP addresses begin with 195. So to save time and effort, or so I thought, I banned the whole range 195.*.*.* - only to discover later that doing it that way resulted in anyone whose IP address had 195 anywhere in it was also banned. It also meant that those using dynamic IP addresses, such as AOL subscribers, might be able to post a comment one day only to find they were supposedly "banned" the next time they signed on - and perhaps "unbanned" the time after that.

I have deleted almost all the bans. Hopefully, people will not have a problem commenting here. If you do, please let me know ASAP.