Some time in the past few days, my WordPress dashboard recorded its 50 000-th comment. I meant to watch out for it and note the lucky commenter, but I’ve been travelling and missed it. These comments span the period since the beginning of 2004 – I lost thousands of comments in the Great Database Disaster of 2003, and there were lots more in an early commenting system called Haloscan that I never managed to transfer.
Comments are a crucial element of a blog, and I’d like to thank both regular and occasional commenters for their contributions and for the fact that, most of the time, discussion here is sufficiently civilised and constructive to advance our understanding of the issues. If you’ve thought about commenting, but not got around here, this post would be a great opportunity
On the other hand there’s the spammers who make running comments much harder than it should be. I’ve only been running Akismet for six months or so, and its already picked up more than the 50 000 genuine comments accumulated over three years.
John Quiggin 
#50,001 hurrah
No comment.
Congratulations! And here’s to the next 50,000!
A big hearty congrats on the milestone JQ, and so say all of us!!!
Hey JQ,
Congrats on your 50K comments, how did you do it?
Winston
“Turn Your Ugly Laptop Into An Art Piece”
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Congrats!
Congrats, John, and thanks once again for this forum.
Congratulations. I tend to judge the worthiness (whatever that means) by the quality of its commenters. If you’re getting alot of hits but your commenters can’t put one word in front of the other, well you’re not talking to the decision makers.
Needless to say that is not a problem you face. Thanks for having the patience to moderate our usually meaningless but hopefully occasionally illuminating ramblings 🙂