I'm annoyed this morning. OK, for those of you who know me, I'll make the necessary correction — I'm annoyed more than usual. And, yes, I've had my morning cup of coffee.

It seems that we are getting more and more of these sorts of comments on the blog: "Very informative post." /s/ Friendly Mortgage Modifiers.com. Of course, the signature is always hyperlinked to a web page where someone purports to want to help people save their homes. These comments are a transparent attempt to draw traffic to these sites and always will be deleted pursuant to our policy against commercial marketing in the comments.

This blog is devoted to discussions of credit and bankruptcy matters at a policy level and by persons who have some professional expertise in the area. Consumers often find the blog when they are looking for answers to their problems. We have deliberately avoided taking any commercial advertising lest it be misconstrued as our endorsement of the product or service. Using the comments for nothing more than commercial marketing and piggybacking on our bloggers' credibility is wrong and misleading. The frequency and brazenness of these sorts of comments raises the question of whether an industry that has to stoop to such tactics has any legitimate service to offer.

P.S. to our regular readers and commenters — I was reluctant to post this lest our regular readers and commenters become concerned about violating our policy. One of the things that makes this blog work is our readers are pretty expert in the matters we discuss. Links to professional web sites or similar identifying links are not a problem. Indeed, I'm a fan of non-anonymous comments whenever possible. The sort of comments that are the subject of this post do not try to engage with the substantive discussion and are clearly abusive.