Policy Change

I’ve run by far the most, er, liberal comment policy among Minnesota bloggers with traffic in my general weight class ever since I started carrying comments in 2002.

I ask for civility, as a general rule – but don’t require it, or at least not to a pollyanna-ish extent.  Don’t get too pointlessly inflammatory, and don’t go too far off topic, and we’ll get along just fine.

Unlike many blogs in my general traffic class, I don’t censor comments, and I don’t block commenters that I find annoying, to say nothing of those that try to challenge me.

I welcome commenters who disagree with me – indeed, encourage them. In the history of this blog, I think I’ve actually banned a grand total of half a dozen commenters – none of them for disagreeing with me, or even being jerks about it.

However, the comment section has a goal; to serve as a forum for discussion.  Which is to say, discussion of the topics I write about.

By extension, this means two things:

  • By discussion, I mean a two-way dialog.  Not repeatedly, constantly, very deliberately, dropping comments and running away without any further discussion, as if my comment section is your personal blog space.  It’s not.  You want a place to drop your comments without further comment?  Get your own blog, and build your own audience.
  • By the topics I write about, I mean “in relation to the posts I’m writing about”.   Now, I don’t mind the occasional thread-jack; sometimes they lead me to a topic I’d have missed otherwise.  But some thread-jacks just say “I don’t want to talk about what you’re writing about; I want to talk about what want to talk about”.  Which is your prerogative – on your own blog.   Go out to Blogger.com or Tumblr or WordPress and start building your own audience.  It’s harder than it looks.

So I’m changing policies;  the following behavior will wind up with the commenter getting put in the moderation queue:

  • Commenters who make a habit of leaving comments without discussing them, ever
  • Repeated thread-jacking with an intent to turn the comment section into the commenter’s publication space.

When posts go in the moderation queue, they stay there until the offender contacts me to work things out.

I’m sorry it’s come to this.

58 thoughts on “Policy Change

  1. Doesn’t particularly bother me, but Mitch must get pretty bored with it.

    Nah. No big deal.

    And I wouldn’t place too much emphasis on responding to every comment.

    There’s a difference between not responding to everything, and using my comment section as a metablog.

  2. I ran one of Emery’s quotes through the reading level checker:
    http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=59456&cpage=4#comment-154745

    Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 10.3

    Emery, old sod! Another public school boy! Remember when we debagged ‘Lofty’ Anstruther and ran his underpants up the flagpole? Just as his Lordship showed up for an inspection and ran off a smart salute!
    Damn lucky they blamed it on that Chilean Jew in the second form. What was his name? ‘Blanche’, I think.
    Tally ho!

  3. You have to up your game, Nerdbert.

    Nope. I use the level appropriate for the occasion.

    Nearly all studies have shown that writing at too high a level gets you ignored or deprecated by the majority of readers and it’s taken conscious effort to default to writing and speaking at an appropriate level in public. You learn this when you teach if you want to be a good teacher, too.

    If called upon I will change the complexity of style, but it’s very rare for that to be appropriate in public. Menken was about the only writer with whom I’m familiar to pull off an incredibly high level of writing complexity and remain a popular writer for the general public. His columns are marvels of wit and I could never pull off what he did.

  4. Nearly all studies have shown that writing at too high a level gets you ignored or deprecated by the majority of readers

    When I was a tech writer, writing online help, we’d usually shoot for a fifth grade level; not because users are dumb, but because when a user is using online help, they usually need to spend their mental energy solving a problem, not parsing language.

    When I wrote radio news, it was even more the case.

  5. When writing a legal brief for a judge to read, it helps to know whether the judge knows anything about the subject matter (that is NOT a given, depends on the judge’s background).

    If I’m confident she does, I can use more complex language. If I suspect she does not, I try to use easier-to-understand language. My goal is to persuade, not to impress and certainly not to perplex.

    Oddly, I have the same goal here, which might explain why the grade level of my writing is around an 8.

  6. We always aim for an 8th grade level — it’s the sweet spot if you want to be reach the largest audience.

  7. Hey, don’t blame me, Nerdbert. Blame MBerg — he seems to have some kind of Flesch-Kincaid filter that pitches anything below a tenth grade level into the moderation queue.

  8. Perhaps, MBerg, since Akismet is apparently filtering by Flesch-Kincaid grade level, you could make this filter available to your readers. I imagine a button the reader could click that would load only those comments with an F-K score equal to or greater than grade 10 (I feel that I should make clear that “F-K” is an abbreviation for Flesh-Kincaid).
    I will even suggest possible URL’s for the two versions: shotinthedark.info/supernals for comments at or above F-K level 10, and shotinthedark.info/rabble for those comments below an F-K grade of 10. Or perhaps shotinthedark.info/steerage.
    Your welcome!

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