We have software to detach the comments and do mechanical things like that, but finding ways to vary the message about civility seems important to me, so I force myself to do those by hand. Sometimes I throw in variations to counter tedium, even with the idea that it might have entertainment value... though that is dangerously easy to overdo.

There's a design point here too. After two years, these comments have shown themselves to be partly formulaic and the sort of thing that could benefit from software support. I'd like that software support to be something available to users, not just moderators. If there were a way for users to convey to each other that a comment could be edited to better follow the guidelines, that'd be great, because we (actually just I in this respect, since I'm the only one currently posting moderation comments) would no longer be the bottleneck. The long-term vision for HN is to make it a self-regulating system.