Blogging: when to remove comments?

Some website chat follows. If you’re not interested in the ins and outs of such things, I wouldn’t bother reading on.

The other day I received a comment on a post which was not only off-topic and pretty rude but also made with a false email address (I wrote the commenter a polite email asking him to rein it in a little bit and the email bounced back immediately). There was no doubt that I’d remove the comment but even as I did so, it annoyed me a bit that I had to. I don’t like removing comments comments from this blog unless they’re obvious spam, because it always feels somewhat dictatorial.

So I thought I’d refine and simplify my comments policy to make it a little clearer exactly what you need to do to get your comment removed, and what you should do if you think a comment was removed unfairly.

I also want to make it absolutely clear that (a) I’m always very open about my identity when commenting on other blogs and in my own ‘about me’ section; (b) I’m annoyed when other blogs (“lifeincatalonia”, for example), use the comment moderation tool to suppress criticism, argument or clarification – in my opinion, not the way to promote debate on your pages; and (c) that I find it rather creepy when I get three or four different comments from the same IP address using different names, emails and websites… not creepy enough to make me delete your comments but creepy enough to take note.

7 thoughts on “Blogging: when to remove comments?

  1. Yeah but that’s your schtick.

    Anyway, I must have deleted about 2 whole comments this year (yeah, I know, 50%)… I guess I was really more annoyed by having my comments deleted on other blogs (this crappy Moleskinecity one is an example) and so had been pondering why I’d need to do it and what to do when I had the impulse to do it but wasn’t sure.

  2. I agree it’s not nice to remove comments. I don’t think I’ve ever removed a non-spam comment (maybe bleeped out the swearing..) – even if it’s off topic then something must have prompted the twit to post it.

  3. Since I haven’t posted anything controversial on my new blog I have avoided the trolls. But I remember on my old blog I turned off comments because of some hysterical nationalists that completely missed the point of my posts. Dealing with comments became a sick obsession and i decided to just cut them out all together.

    You could try “disemvoweling” the posts like boingboing. DUNNO. Or stop writing about Nivel C and all those magical and fun things.

  4. The worst comments I ever got were writing about ‘Solidaridad Española Con Cuba’ and this arsehole economist Jorge Valín (so nothing to do with Catalan).

  5. By the way, I’ve noticed that some psycho is also attributing comments to me on the “Life In Catalonia” blog. Someone has way too much time on their hands.

  6. The only comments I remove, are those with links to porno sites, all the rest stay, whether I like them or not.
    I even keep the comments of those who block comments in their sites (and later even change their identity), so that I cannot write my opinion there.

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