And why I have no use for them.

This morning, I reviewed an interesting comment left in this blog’s Guest Book. It had been held for moderation, which means I have to review and approve it before it appears online.

Nasty for No Reason

The comment was one of the nastiest I’ve ever read. The person who decided to try to ruin my day told me that this site was like a garage that needed clearing out — or something like that; I didn’t preserve his words for posterity. He told me I should delete anything over six months old. He said he’d come to find information about my books but that he wasn’t willing to use the “convoluted” (his word) methods needed to find content here. He finished up by saying he was an editor — imagine that! — and that he now has no interest in any of my books.

Whew!

He evidently forgot to mention the problem with his eyesight that prevented him from seeing links clearly marked “Books” and “Articles” in the NavBar at the top of the page. He also appeared to miss the note in the description of this site — which appears “above the fold” on the Home page — that clearly said support for my books had been moved to Maria’s Guides. And that Search feature at the top of the site navigation column — I suppose the label “Search This Site” isn’t clear enough. And I guess I couldn’t expect him to scroll down on any page of the site to see the list of books supported with the links to content related to those books.

Convoluted? The only way I could make this site easier to navigate is to take control of his computer while he’s online here and guide his mouse to the link he needs.

He probably spent more time wording and editing his comment than he did looking around the site for the content he evidently wasn’t so interested in in the first place.

I deleted his comment, as I do with any other nasty comment that serves no purpose other than to rudely criticize me or someone else. I think that if he had presented his opinions more courteously, I would have given them some real consideration. But since his comment was obviously posted as a personal attack on me, I threw it away with the rest of the crap I encounter online.

On Bottom Dwellers

But it reminded me that there’s a lot of bottom-dwellers out there, looking to bring other people down to their level. The Internet is full of them and the worst thing you can give any of them is a keyboard and a form to fill in with their rude and destructive comments. I know bloggers who have turned off the commenting feature on their blogs because of the amount of crap like this that they get. Other bloggers let it run rampant in their comments, letting it feed the other bottom dwellers lurking out there until there’s nothing mature or civil about their blogs. As we’ve seen in the past, that can quickly get out of hand.

What these bottom-dwellers clearly do not understand is that my blog is mine. I decide on the design, I decide on the content, I decide on how long to keep blog posts, I even decide whether a comment is appropriate on a post. If he doesn’t like my site, he can go somewhere else — there’s enough content out there for everyone. As my mother would say, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”