About Comments
Sometimes in the Online World you have to almost wear a suit of armor. I think that it’s important to not so much have a “thicker skin” as to accept that sometimes people just won’t always agree with you. And some of those people aren’t going to be so nice about it.
There’s a discussion in a writer’s forum of which I’m a member about blog commenting and when to delete comments. Some people believe that any comments that aren’t in agreement with the subject at hand should be deleted. They think that these kind of comments are “mean” to a certain extent. So they send those comments to the spam file.
I don’t agree with that. I appreciate that people won’t always like what I have to say and that sometimes they’ll just think I’m an idiot. And that’s fine. As long as they’re not abusive in stating their own opinion I’ll let it stand. I have my comments open for dialogue and not just the “I agree!” kind. If I make a point of only allowing echoing sentiments, then I’m discouraging reader participation. At least that’s my belief.
I won’t allow people to abuse each other in the comments, but if there’s a debate of some type I have no problems. If someone is being a jerk for the sake of being a jerk and another commenter argues against that behavior, I’ll let that go. I’ll only censor when it’s really ugly- or personally harmful. I don’t see many other reasons for comment moderation. I want the conversation afterall.
I do take a little bit of umbrage to the comments left by link seekers. The ones that say “Good post!” Ok, what’s good about it? What part did you particularly agree with? Bah! Those annoy the crap out of me. And in the circles that I sometimes run I see too many of these comments. Please read the post before agreeing with it. OK? Thanks.
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If you are not getting much comments every single comments counts.For example if someone sees that a post has a few comments they are more inclined to comment themselves. Unless its very obvious that someone is using that tactic over and over again to get into Top commentator plug in or something like that I want delete them.
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Good post! Ha ha. Just kidding. Well, no — it *was* a good post actually. I used to leave all comments except for rude remarks about my kids (got one of those once!), but when I switched blogs, I decided to change that. Now I delete any comment that offends me. How do I define this? I don’t; I have a notice that comments may be deleted at my whim. Mostly I don’t delete any though. Anonymous trolling gets nuked, and any non-regular who gets nasty to a regular will likely get hosed. That’s pretty much it.
Deleting comments because you don’t agree with the content is ridiculous, interesting conversation has distention and drama. Anyone who deletes comments they don’t like (in terms of the position articulated) is an isolationist fool.
Now the spam comments and the “good post” comments are indeed different. And of course there are middle ground comments where the comment is actually pretty good but it is clearly from a “one time johnny” who is just stopping by to get some link juice. For those you might want to consider a Wordpress plugin called, well, I forget the name exactly - but its something like “delink spam comments” and what it does when you are approving the comment you have the option to approve the comment (because the comment is valid) but remove the offending link. Most of the times the person never comes back anyway. If they do and they become a constructive commenter I then ask them to include a different link so I can give them some google juice (escpeically since on that blog I dofollow)
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