Just a reminder, since I don’t post often (inertia problems mostly):
Comments are under moderation, so your comments won’t appear immediately, and it may take months or even years for all I know for me to get to your comment. If your comment doesn’t appear instantly, that does not mean I have rejected it, it just means I have not approved it yet. Comment approval is not the highest priority in my life at the moment so I can’t guarantee anything about when I’ll get around to stuff. I just got around to stuff from a year ago, if that gives you any idea.
As far as comment policy goes, I’ve tried to write one and I don’t really officially have one. I use common sense, that’s all I can really say.
Comments that seem more like they’re intended as personal emails, don’t get posted, but I do read them, usually. I don’t usually respond to them though — or to any other personal emails for that matter. At the moment, it’s rare that I manage to reply to even personal emails from my closest friends: that inertia problem again. So don’t be alarmed or offended if I never reply to your comment, either here or by email.
Comments that reveal a large degree of personal information (real or otherwise) about people — whether other people, me, or even the commenter sometimes (if it looks again like they’re mistaking it for a personal email rather than a comment form) won’t get posted, generally.
Comments that engage in gossip or defamation won’t generally get posted. If I have ever let those through in the past, I apologize. Defamatory comments will be forwarded to my lawyer with IP addresses, deleted, and promptly forgotten.
Comments that exist specifically and deliberately to stress me out (don’t worry, you know who you are, and if it’s not you, you won’t have to worry, there is no mistaking these) won’t get posted, and will get considered by people close to me as a form of assault if they manage to actually do me harm, since my adrenal insufficiency and the results of deliberately causing me severe enough stress are public knowledge at this point. Such comments (and comments that are illegal, harassing, defamatory, etc. — generally a category that overlaps, here) will generally get forwarded on to my lawyer as well as deleted, and then I forget about them very quickly.
Aside from those sorts of things, I let comments through on a case-by-case basis. For the most part I let comments through, whether I agree with them or not. If I don’t let comments through, it’s generally because they either seem like they’re intended as private emails (or any of the other above issues), or else because there’s something about them that seems more hurtfUl or otherwise harmful than it is useful. That’s always a judgement call. Sometimes I’ll doubtless make mistakes. Sometimes I know I’ve accidentally hit the wrong button while moderating comments.
But I think it’s far more fair to just say I make judgement calls, than it is to write out a ridiculously complex comment policy that has specific hard-and-fast rules that I could never actually abide by. If I wrote a long, detailed comments policy, what would actually happen would be the following, most likely: People who wrote absolutely innocent comments that violated the comment policy wouldn’t get their comments posted. People who were up to no good would find ways of violating the spirit of the law while obeying the letter, and get their comments through, and if I didn’t let their comments through they would gripe endlessly about how I wasn’t abiding by my own comment policy. Especially if I let through innocent comments that technically violated it. Lots of people would be paralyzed into not posting by fear of screwing up with one or more of the rules (I know people this happens to a lot, and it happens to me a lot in blogs with complex detailed comment policies). So it’s just better if I say, if you’re not an asshole and don’t write something that looks like a private email or certain kinds of request on me, it’s likely that eventually your comment will get posted, and if it doesn’t it’s likely either a mistake on my part or your comment ending up in my spam filters. Which happens a lot, the spam filter thing, I forgot to mention — when I have time to go through my spam filters, which is almost never, but when I used to have time, I would always, always, always find lots of legitimate comments sitting around in there collecting dust.
So I will eventually get to your comment. If your comment is legit, and not malicious, most likely it will get posted, just not necessarily fast, because I do have disabilities that interfere with moderating stuff. Comments that seem like private emails, or that are specific kinds of requests of me (mostly to do with permission to do such-and-such or interview requests and the like) won’t get posted usually. Comments that look indistinguishable from spam bots will possibly not get posted either. Gossip and malicious comments will not get posted if I notice them. And other than that, I use my judgement. I know some people get really upset when their comments are not instantly posted, and think I’m censoring them, but that’s highly unlikely if your comment was legit and not any of the other categories I’ve described. The most likely reason for a comment not going through, by far, is that I haven’t gotten to it yet (and sometimes I don’t moderate all my comments in chronological order, so that’s no say of it either)
Maybe I ought to eventually make this a page, not just a post. But since I’m planning on making at least one post for Blogging Against Disablsim Day, which draws more traffic than usual, I thought I should make this post. Maybe I’l clean it up and make it a page, though, eventually. I’m still finding my way around this new blogging software as well — it was hard enough to figure out how to post things.
(It’s amazing how just lacking a certain amount of mental energy, makes me way more computer illiterate than I used to be. Either that or I’ve finally hit the age where new computer stuff becomes WTFWTFWTF!?!! You should see the kind of cell phone I have, everyone else sees it as a dinosaur but I can barely keep with the existence of cellphones, let alone smartphones, so I got something I can text on that does very little else, and I’m sticking with that as long as I can get away with it.)
Ballastexistenz 