Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Blog Comment Policy

Updated January 2007

I encourage rational discussion & comments, but not personal character assassination to make your point. If I have made a mistake, fine, point it out & we will go from there. If you agree or disagree, put it down. Add to the discussion if possible, or make your opinion known without resorting to name-calling of the author or others.

If you want to leave anonymous messages, fine, but if you want to flame the positions of the author or the other people who take the time to comment on the material presented, have the decency, courage (or as another blogging friend would put it, the cajones) to put your name/blog/address to your post.

There have also been some abuses of my good nature to sidetrack off of the main topic of the post to discuss related material. That's fine as long as it's relevant and doesn’t detract too much from the topic at hand.

But one of the things that I am beginning to be annoyed with is the incessant nitpicking over isolating one statement in a paragraph and taking it out of context.If you want to make a comment, comment on the entire post or paragraph as it suits you.Again, we’ll go from there.

Otherwise, don't be surprised if it gets blown away into itty-bitty pieces without warning. Or changed to make the comment seem even more ridiculous than what it already says. Continued abuses can and will lead to banning, but only as a last resort. For better or worse, this is my updated policy.

4 comments:

Nightcrawler said...

And a great policy it is, Tom!

The Conservative UAW Guy said...

You can also moderate comments in Blogger.
W/Haloscan, you can modify them.
Heh.
That's fun, and the troll usually shape up or ship out, after 1 or two mods.

The Conservative UAW Guy said...

Oh, yeah.
You can make your blogger comment so they at least have to have a blogger account (not necessarily a blog, but at the very least, an account with a name).

Tom said...

Yeah, I know about the moderation, but perhaps I'm slightly naive. I'm expecting people to be adults in their comments on the posts, and for any newbies out there that may not have Blogger accounts to feel welcome & express themselves (nicely, of course).

Haloscan looks to be a nice tool, but I have had some problems leaving comments on other sites - just strange behavior. Also, since I'm backing up the blog to another site (wordpress), Haloscan doesn't translate over. If Haloscan had a backup feature, I could go for it.