I’ve managed to get by so far without a comment policy. I haven’t gotten many, and nearly all of those have been non-objectionable. As a safety measure, I’ve left moderation on, just in case things changed. It turns out I was wise to do so.
Coincident with yesterday’s Instalanche has been a rash of anonymous (and mostly nasty) comments. This is a leisure time activity for me, so I’ve taken a few steps to ensure blogging remains fun. First, I deleted all the comments for which it was obvious the comment form was not filled in honestly. (This turned out to be all of them.) Second, I’ve changed the discussion settings so that commenters must be logged into a WordPress.com account. My hope is that this requirement will serve to repel the casual troll.
Anyone whose comment was deleted in the last two days can create an account and resubmit their comments, and I’ll consider approving them. Honestly, though, I don’t expect to see many of those people back.
I’ve also decided to institute the following comment policy:
- Thoughtful rebuttals (or agreement) will be cheerfully approved.
- Non-sequitur rebuttals will be grumpily approved (mainly because I can’t be bothered to police comments for logic), provided they are civil. I will probably ignore them, though.
- Comments I deem to be uncivil will be thrown out with the spam.
As nearly any blogger will tell you, I’m the one paying for this (although, thanks to WordPress.com, I’m not paying very much), so I make the rules. The main rule is blogging needs to be fun for me. If you don’t like it, you can get your own blog. WordPress.com will be happy to set you up for free.
Internet Scofflaw 