I hate the idea of a comment policy. The regular readers are all intelligent enough to make any policy redundant. The tiny minority who are delusional enough to cause a problem wouldn’t seriously stop to read any comment policy anyway. But occasionally a perfectly good comment will either disappear or fail to appear. Here’s why.

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This is about as close as I'd like to get to a barrister. Photo (cc) Steve Punter.

I’ve been busy recently. Hopefully you’ll see the fruits of some of that work shortly, but it means I haven’t had time to write much here. One of the side-effects is that I get email pointing to something that I should blog about from a few people. For example an artefact has turned up somewhere which is really dodgy. I’d guess there’s some sort of illegal activity in its sale, but I don’t have the time to research where. Now if I had a forum I could leave it and half-a-dozen other people could have been talking about this on site. One problem though is libel.

If you’re running an auction house, Ponsonby’s for the sake of argument. If you routinely sell unprovenanced antiquities then you really rely More >