The Thought Police

For those of you who weren't here for the very early part of Cedar's Mountain, I used to let the people of the blog world run rampant on my blog. What I mean by rampant is that people could leave their comments and I would respond to them whenever I felt like checking my blog. No muss, no problems, and no worrying about people leaving nasty and offensive comments.

This was something I made a point in doing during the first year of my blog, simply because after coming from the chat rooms, where everyone and their mommy moderated the living daylights out of the website, I really wanted to have my blog be a place where people could exercise their rights to freedom of speech. And for the first six months, I let my blog do just that.
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However, around Thanksgiving '08, I had some toddler follow me from the chat rooms and start leaving gratuitous homosexual insults on both of my blogs (this one and my book blog). Suffice to say that I was incredibly pissed about this about this jackass doing this (I got rid of said jackass by using a pretty despicable method that I don't recommend to anyone unless it's absolutely necessary), so after deleting his comments, I wrote this post explaining why I was going to start moderating my comments, and have been ever since.

For the next calendar year (Nov '08 to Nov '09), the only comments I've nuked were some obvious spam links that a few posters left on my blog, one of which I even wrote a post about. I also nuked someone's comment by accident, because 1} I didn't recognize the poster's name and 2} the comment she left was similar to a few I was getting from another troll from the chat rooms who was leaving me infantile rants as well.

Because I moderated comments on my blog (and I'm very open minded about it), I knew it was necessary to reciprocate when I visited other blogs. Whenever I decided to leave a comment at someone else's blog, I always made sure that the comment was in the same spirit at as that blog.

For example, if I visited the blog that is run by Lynn or the one run by Jewel, I made sure to watch my language and keep it in the same lighthearted spirit as theirs. If I visited say, the blog run by Riot Kitty or the political blog run by Zirgar, then I knew that my language could be a bit more colorful and still maintain that zestiness that attracted me to their blogs in the first place (except for R.K's, it was her funky avatar that first got me interested in hers).

The reason for me revisiting the issue of comment moderation some one and half years later (I first wrote about this issue back in the late summer of '08), is that once again I experienced the problem of ineffectual comment moderation. Specifically, two of my comments were nuked earlier in the week on someone else's blog.

I'm really at a loss for words as to why my two comments were nuked, insomuch as they were written in the exact same spirit that the blog was written in. The first time it was nuked, I raised an eyebrow over it and gave the person the slight benefit of the doubt, which meant that I blamed a "glitch" with Blogger as for the reason why my comment didn't stick.

So as an expirement, I left another comment that basically said this: Interesting, either the computer glitched and that's why my comment didn't stick, or the dreaded "n" option was done to it.

I came back the next day (which was yesterday the 5th) and after reading a couple of the blog's current posts, I went back to the post in question. Sure enough, my new comment wasn't there either.

After mulling it over in my mind for about five seconds, I decided to eliminate said blog from my bookmarked faves. So not only do I have one less blog to worry about, I'll also have one less poster to worry about. I'm not so much for the playing the game of tit-for-tat (you nuked mine so I'll nuke yours) but more of playing the game of writing a post about it. Which is really how I lost one semi-regular to my blog from last year, and if you go back three paragraphs to the last link, you'll see what I mean.

The main idea behind writing this particular post about it, is to simply show my displeasure the easiest and safest way I know how. If this person gets the idea that somehow this post is about them, then I did my job well, because that means they got a 100% on another section of this never ending exam that is called Life, and that they'll have the sad misfortune of never having me visit their blog again.

If not, then I still have the very small kernel of satisfaction of getting a particularly irritating aspect about blogging off my chest without going completely nutso about it.

Comment moderation: in the hands of a pro, it is a truly marvelous thing as it gets used judiciously and effectively; in the hands of a novice, it can stop a blog dead before it can even really get started.