‘Hey, what happened to my comment?’

I really wish that Blogger would provide a means to add auxiliary, fixed pages — the way that WordPress does. (It turns out that WordPress is a superior tool in many ways, but… there’s no going back now.) If I could have posted a standing comment policy from the beginning, I would have done so.

Comments are something that bloggers struggle with, almost across the board. They are simultaneously both the fruit and the poison of one’s efforts. If your blog is really, really successful, you can turn them off and forget about them. But if your blog is just mildly to moderately successful, it’s best to leave comments enabled as a means to receive feedback from the readership. Naturally, comments will be both positive and negative in nature. Which is just fine — both types are valuable. Up to a point.

This blog, in particular, is a little different than most. I write about illegal activities here, and I also write about an industry upon which many of my readers (but not myself) depend for their livelihood. It’s an industry in major upheaval at the moment. An industry where the (nominal) anonymity of the participants is a constant. And also, it’s an industry chalk full of deleterious personalities — for instance… those who are mentally and/or emotionally unstable; those who are corrupt and predatory; and those who are sexually deviant. Mix these things all up together, and the result can be pretty fucking ugly. Distill that ugliness into a few sentences of anonymous choice words, and sometimes the result is garbage that I don’t particularly feel like publishing.

This situation has been exacerbated by the lack of a published comment policy, which would at least enable me to spell out the ground rules in advance, and allow me to say “Look, you should have known the rules before you bothered,” in reply to the nasty-grams that I sometimes get from those who feel slighted when their mental vomit isn’t published alongside my own carefully crafted prose. This is why I have included an ‘on-the-fly’ policy along with each segment of my ongoing PSEN series, which — for some reason — seems to generate the largest volume of word-poop.

But a blanket policy is still needed, and I don’t have a quick and easy way to put it out there, outside of a blog post like this one. So, here goes:

• If your comment is positive in nature, no worries. I will publish it gladly. I don’t care if it’s anonymous or not.
• If your comment is neutral or negative in nature — but polite and well-reasoned, I will publish it.
• If your comment slams this blog, or the author — but you have the guts to identify yourself (state your name and email address, at minimum), I will publish it.
• If your comment is a drive-by turd-dropping that does little else than vent your spleen — and you don’t have the cajones to tell us who you are — you can go fuck yourself.

There, I hope that is simple enough for everyone to understand. I really like to get your comments, and would really prefer to publish them — even if you don’t agree with me. But, this is my soapbox. If you want to post garbage, and post it anonymously, you already have a place to do that.