Updated 2025-03-29

Being new to blogging, I’m still trying to figure out my commenting policy. I’ll have to experiment. As it’s setup now, it seems to work if you leave your name, email, and a comment. When you “Post Comment” it should get sent and saved for later review and acceptance or denial by the moderator (me). So, your comment will not appear on the post until I approve it. I hope to turn these around in a day or less. I tried this myself, and it worked. For now I’ll keep it like this.

I highly recommend you type your comment in a text editor, word processor, whatever, and save unless it’s really short. It’s infuriating when the web dog eats your work.

Rules on commenting

1. Keep profanity to a minimum. None is better and will improve chances of approval.
2. No personal attacks. Check your nastiness. I’ll give you more latitude if it’s directed at me, less if directed at another commenter. If you have something petty and mean to say, don’t bother. To be clear, I’m not trying to silence sincerely held beliefs of horror and disgust at what others espouse. That would detract from honest dialog. I will have rather unflattering things to say about some people. In keeping with the spirit of open dialog, I have to allow others to do the same with me and other others in general.
3. Do not troll other commenters. Commenting on a comment because you actually have something to say is not trolling.
4. I dislike reactions like emojis or up-voting and down-voting. Comments are for when you actually have something to say. If you put something like “Agree.”, fine, because you might not have anything else to add yet still want to register what you think, but even then do it selectively. If you disagree, that’s fine, but say why. I’ll be looser on this rule than the others. The main point is that I want comments to be substantive, not mere votes.

This is my site, and I make the rules and decide how to enforce them. Take it or leave it.

Goals of this policy

1. Create productive commentary and dialog. I would say intelligent, but that’s subjective. Also I don’t want to imply it needs to be erudite, pedantic, or elegant. So, I’ll say not absurd, which is more objective and what I really mean.
2. Foster better understanding among disagreeing parties.
3. Keep the troll farms and AI bots off. (There are fancy tools to automate this, and I might take a more hands-off moderation posture if I ever get the time to figure that out.)

I’m not really trying to create a forum here. I do want thoughtful comments about the things I write (and on comments on things I write), but they need to be relevant to my post. If you want to go into unrelated subject matter, do that in another forum. You can post a link to that other forum/thread in your comment. There’s a reason I’m the only one that gets to create new posts.

Contacting me

This part is a work in progress. Unless there’s already a WordPress backdoor I don’t know about, there’s presently no way to contact me directly through this website other than leaving a comment on a post. That has 2 problems: it has to be slapped onto an existing post (and I like comments to be relevant to the post), and it’s not private. I will look into this as time permits – perhaps I can set up an email address at this site just for that.

Respectfully,
John K.