As you may have noticed, I temporarily removed the option to place comments on this blog.
My philosophy has always been to encourage free speech on the blog. I never censored any comments, I never blocked anyone from commenting and I've tried to be fair and honest in answering the comments made on the blog, especially those opinions that may have been different than mine.
Apparently, some people thought it their prerogative to use my blog's comment section as a battleground for an ongoing, personal argument. It got to the point that neither of them was commenting on the actual blog article in question, they were just pissing on each other in my blog site. It got totally out of hand, so I just shut it down.
Now that I've had a few days to cool off and think this over, I've decided to bring up the comments section again. I think it is an important part of a blog and I will not let rude, immature, inconsiderate pricks wreck my blog. I will be approving the comments before they get posted, so in effect I will be censoring them. I'm sorry its come to this, but it has.
I've taken down the whole article on VSX that started this disaster, because it is the only way I can censor the objectionable comments. This is particularly irksome to me because that blog article was the one linked to the Carnival of Space hosted here on Simostronomy. It is now a broken link thanks to these two. I will be posting a revised version of it, taking into account the "reasonable" comments that were posted before the comments turned into a personal flame fest.
The worst part is these were not anonymous spammers, but people I know. One I even considered a friend. I may forgive them one day, but I will never consider either of them a friend after this. And you can be sure they will never be allowed to comment on this blog or any other site I control, ever.
3 comments:
I think you should delete comments and/or ban commenters before you delete your blog posts. I'm not a fan of censorship but it is YOUR blog, not theirs.
Unfortunately, comments are an all or nothing proposition in the Blogger format. Once they have been published I can't delete them. Nor can I ban specific individuals. The only option left was to take the post down with all the comments, and set the comments to moderated from here on out.
Trust me. I am not happy about that. I tried to edit the post and bring it up under a new date, because it was no small time investment writing the original blog in the first place. But the comments were still attached to it, so I just deleted the whole thing.
I might rewrite it, or not. This whole fiasco has taken some of the shine off writing the blog for me. It's not like a have mountains of free time to do it. Now its got the added level of hassle of having to moderate comments, just because of an idiot and a blowhard.
Thanks for bringing back comments! Now, let's argue about the Scopes trial...
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