Tag Archives: comments

Note to Religious Fanatics

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You are not welcome here.

I am not a religious person. In fact, I’m an atheist.

I don’t use this blog to promote my religious (or non-religious) views. While some of my comments may reflect those views, I’m not trying to convince anyone that they should change their views. Religion (or lack thereof) is a personal choice.

By the same token, I don’t expect or want any reader to use the comments feature to try to convince me or any other reader to change their religious views. If you want to preach, go bother some other blogger. Don’t bother me.

Read this carefully: I will delete any comment that attempts to communicate what I or any other person should believe about a higher being. This blog is not a forum for religious debate. Period.

I just had a four-comment exchange going with a reader who found God and evidently looked down on me because I hadn’t. When I told him I wasn’t interested in a religious debate but offered to leave his comments online for others to discuss with him, he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a debate with me. His final comment — which never appeared here — was a condescending jab at me. I’m inferior in his eyes because I don’t believe that his god is watching over me and controlling my life. This same god, I should mention, is also just standing by while innocent people all over the world suffer from illness, starvation, and the cruelty of others.

God is all powerful and all good? Give me a fucking break.

In the meantime, I think this guy is an idiot for wasting his time preaching religion to the non-religous on the Web.

Well, he blew it and he screwed it up for anyone else with the idea of talking religion here. I won’t tolerate it any more. All of his comments have been removed and you won’t see any others.

You don’t like this policy? Don’t fool yourself into thinking that I care. There are millions of other blogs out there. Go bother someone else.

Another Comment Policy

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And you thought mine was strict.

Reader comments are often what can make a blog far more interesting than it would be without comments. In fact, the commenting feature of blog software can create a community at a blog when regular readers and commenters add their two cents to blog posts.

Unfortunately, not everyone has something of value to add to a conversation. And that doesn’t stop them from adding it.

Comments Here

I review every single comment posted to this blog, so I know the full range of comment quality. Tossing aside the hundreds of daily automated spam comments caught by my spam protection software and the obvious attempts of human readers to redirect my blog’s readers to their sites, the “real” comments can be informative, helpful, interesting, funny, or thoughtful. But they can also be sarcastic, nasty, rude, or offensive.

June 30, 2014 Update
I’ve finally gotten around to writing up the site comment policy on a regular page (rather than post) on this site. You can find it here: Comment Policy.

I state my comment policy in various places throughout this site, including here. Although I occasionally do have to delete a comment that’s overly offensive or one that’s sure to generate a nasty argument, in general, this site has a great group of regular readers and commenters that don’t need to be watched over as if they’re poorly behaved children.

As an example of how much commenting can contribute to a blog, check out one of my posts, “The Helicopter Job Market,” which has accumulated almost 50 comments in just over a year. Many of these comments offer helpful insight to helicopter pilots and wannabes. They’ve created a conversation that just keeps growing — indeed, five comments have been added to that post in just the past week.

Anyway, I welcome comments and won’t prevent one from appearing unless it’s either offensive or totally self-promotional. Get a conversation going. I really enjoy it. And reader comments are often what trigger me to write new blog posts.

A Comment Policy From Down Under

Today, while in search of both images from the Iran missile photo controversy, I stumbled upon an article on the Herald Sun Web site. It showed both photos and provided some commentary about the situation. It mentioned that Iran was firing more test missiles today. The thought that if they kept firing missiles for tests they might run out came to my mind. Since the article had a comment field, I decided to voice that unlikely but amusing thought, mostly to lighten things up.

I posted the comment and submitted it. On the confirmation page, the following comment policy appeared:

Please note that we are not able to publish all the comments that we receive, and that we may edit some comments to ensure their suitability for publishing.

Feedback will be rejected if it does not add to a debate, or is a purely personal attack, or is offensive, repetitious, illegal or meaningless, or contains clear errors of fact.

Although we try to run feedback just as it is received, we reserve the right to edit or delete any and all material.

What I like about this comment policy is how clear it is. It’s warning commenters, almost up front, that what they submit may not appear at all or as it was submitted. I like the second sentence/paragraph. (Oddly enough, the commenter before me said “I Still dont Belive USA went to the Moon” and I’m wondering how that got through the moderation process, being that it’s pretty much meaningless, contains clear errors of fact, and does not add to the debate, but I guess that’s just my opinion.) I find the third sentence/paragraph bothersome, mostly because I don’t believe in editing someone’s comment. If it needs editing, it probably shouldn’t appear at all.

Up for Commenting

Anyway, I’m just tossing this out there, mostly to see what visitors here think about it.

Commenting is one of the good and bad things about blogging. On this site, I really enjoy most of the non-spam comments we receive. As long as you keep commenting, I’ll keep writing.

On Small-Minded, Nasty People

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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.”

Quick Note to Commenters

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Comments are moderated.

Because of the amount of spam and the number of inappropriate comments this site receives, all comments from new commenters are moderated.

Much of the moderation is done automatically with spam prevention software. This software will automatically delete comments coming from blacklisted IP addresses, comments containing too many links, comments containing certain “bad” words, multiple comments submitted from the same IP address or commenter within a short period of time, and comments meeting other proven criteria that I don’t know or really care about.

This two-layer automated spam prevention system catches over 5000 spam comments to my four blog-based sites each day. This gives you an idea of just how bad the problem is. It should also help you understand why I don’t manually review every single comment myself.

The few comments that get through the automated system are manually reviewed. A few of them are true spam that I delete.

Others are comments by visitors who seem to have commented solely to advertise their business or service. Even if these comments are appropriate, if the commenter name field contains a company name or Web site name, that comment will be deleted. My blog-based sites do not exist for other people to advertise their products or services. If you don’t use your name or something that looks like your name in the Commenter Name field of the comment form, don’t expect your comment to appear here. Exceptions are possible but very rare.

Finally, a handful of other comments are nasty or inappropriately critical, abusive to me or other commenters. I don’t take that crap from anyone, especially on my blogs. If you have something critical to say, say it nicely. Don’t bash me or others by calling us names or insulting us.

The comments that make it through this entire moderation process are the ones that appear on the site.

Keep in mind that I go through the manual moderation process every 12 to 72 hours, so you might have to wait up to 3 days for a comment to appear. It all depends on how busy I am and whether I have a good Internet connection when on the road. Be patient.

I’d love it if more commenters would sign up for Gravatars so their custom icons would appear beside their comments.

I really appreciate reader comments, especially those that add to conversation here on this blog. I hope those of you who comment continue to do so. And I hope this message encourages those of you who have not yet commented to add your thoughts as comments to posts on this site.

All Pingbacks Must Die

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I’ve had my last pingback spam.

Anyone who has a blog knows that the comment feature is what makes a blog stand out from a plain old Web site. The comment feature is what makes a blog interactive, it’s what gives readers a chance to share their point of view or additional information about a topic. It gives them a chance to ask questions and get answers.

The comment feature works with the pingback feature. Pingbacks (which are often referred to as trackbacks) are machine-generated “comments” that are added to a post when another blogger writes a post that links to it.

Huh?

Discussion AreaOkay, think of it this way. You’re blogger A writing post 1. Blogger B writes post 2 that includes a link to post 1. A comment appears on post 1 that links back to post 2. This is all done automatically in WordPress (my blogging platform of choice) if — and this is a big if — you left the Allow Pings option turned on for post 1. You can find the setting for this in the Discussion area of the Write Post administration panel.

Unfortunately, the pingback feature also makes it possible for sploggers to get free links to their sites. A splogger builds content on a blog by stealing it from RSS feeds. Their goal is usually to get hits on their Web sites, which are full of Google AdSense ads, but they sometimes are part of a “link farm” that boosts search engine ranking.

The problem lately is that my sites have been attracting more pingback spam from splogging sites than real pings from legitimate sites and bloggers. These must be manually deleted, since my spam prevention software doesn’t seem able to catch them all. And frankly, I’m a little sick of spending each morning deleting six to twenty of these comments.

So I’m going to stop writing posts with the pingback feature enabled.

And if you’re having this problem on your blog, I recommend that you do the same.