Moderation in Moderation?

I moderate my comments, mostly to ensure that there's no spam getting through. But sometimes I end up in a quandary about whether to publish a comment that does not participate in the conversation and is aimed to incite or sell some other service. I tend to not publish these types of posts. Maybe I should (more later).

Here's an interesting case in point. Last night a comment came in on a post I made about LotusLive Engage last week. The comments were more of an anti-IBM and LotusLive rant and went into a Silverlight endorsement. I decided to think about publishing the comment since it was a week late and borderline off-topic. Then I looked at the comments to my friend Volker's excellent blog post summarizing LotusLive, Microsoft Online, and Google Apps pricing. Lo and behold an identical comment to the one I received, word for word from the same author, was on Volker's post.

I mean if your going to troll the Internet for blog postings on a certain topic and write negative comments about the product and/or vendor, you might as well have some imagination and make each comment unique. Otherwise, what a boring job? Needless to say, people following blogs that talk about specific topics and vendors are likely to see duplicated commentary and consider the comment author a fool or at least someone not to pay attention to.

This is not in defense of IBM or LotusLive, that is better done elsewhere and through a community that is interested in the product and the discussion. It's about any commentary on any vendor or topic that serves no purpose. In general I don't want to have my blog become fodder for off-topic sniping, and I have the inclination to control it. However, this is the sort of stuff that comes with free-range social software and I should probably let nature take its course. What do you think?

For the record, I'm not going to post the comment since it clearly isn't serious.