Yet another instance where quantity is valued ahead of quality: the way the folks at imdb.com attempt to validate comments submitted by movie-goers.

Having nothing else to do, I thought I would enter my comments about Spider-Man 2 in their website; I simply copy/pasted my blog entry about the movie into the comments box (after the obligatory registration process) and clicked on the 'Submit' button, only to be told that comments have to be at least ten lines long to be accepted. I promptly introduced additional line breaks in my comments, and the servlet (or whatever) at the back end accepted them without any further complaints.

Though these folks have earned my ire for trying to enforce artificial constraints like this, the fact that they didn't even use a more intelligent filter (like the number of words in my comments, for example) prevents me from honouring them by adding them to my list of people with bad karma.