Monday, March 01, 2004

Want to leave a comment? Feel free, but please take account of the guidelines


Comments like a good after dinner debate, side bets on a bare knuckle boxing match or an 'artistic' floor show at a gentlemans evening can bring a lot to the party or even become the main event.

I welcome comments; even for opinions that I don't necessarily agree with. I try to take a light touch on moderation. If you like I am a blog comment libertarian.


Relevant links in the comments are encouraged - if you’re leaving a comment on my blogs and want to point to a link on your own or someone else’s site that is relevant to the topic then please feel free to do so. It brings in a wider range of reference and allows other readers and me to discover sites and links that we may have otherwise not found; its good for the soul and the intellect. One last thing on links, keep 'em relevant.

I have measures in place which automatically catch the majority of spam posts.
There is always some person who thinks that they can make money for nothing: not on my watch buddy - get down and graft with the rest of us. I don’t put up with it unless its unintentionally funny and I can hold it up for ridicule and get some cheap laughs at your expense.

Flame wars: when I was a kid and my Mum got upset, she would go on and on about what she was upset about and it sounded like a 40 - 50 minute tape loop, that's kind of like what flame wars are like. When they get start to get cyclical in nature, I'll step in and REGULATE as Warren G and Nate Dogg would say.

Haters: whilst we live in a democracy with freedom of expression, hateful remarks will go the way of spam.

Ok, so I have bounced your post and you feel hard done by. The reason why this is called guidelines is for a good reason. A blog is a dynamic document, it would be wrong to constrain comments with a rigid process. The guidelines are not rigid, but designed to capture the spirit and values by which comments are welcomed or moderated on my blog. As Charles Davies an ex-colleague of mine at Yahoo! used to say: guidelines are not tramlines.

If you feel hard done by, life's not fair and yes I am a small but significant part of the global conspiracy against you.

Finally some advice, think long-term. Your comments are a permanent record of who you are and what your values are. They have the ability to make or break your reputation.

You know one of the first things I do when I am scheduled to interview someone for a job? Put their names into Google and follow any interesting trails that come up.

If you want to make a fool of yourself, I might just let you. The whole thing about this Interweb thing is that everything is interconnected, a comment isn't just a comment but a small piece of a mosiac that is your online identity.