Entries Tagged 'comment policy' ↓
December 27th, 2007 — flame war, Nazism, incivility, injustice, trolls, smiley, Serbia, comment policy, spam, wikis, forum, Israel, anti-Semitism, hate, blogging
To our readers, and other bloggers and admins:
As we all know, some people in the world are angry and destructive, and many of those are on the Internet. These angry people exert a negative effect on anyone who has the misfortune to encounter them, even if it is only a feeling of fatigue and disgust. Some angry and destructive persons are genuinely dangerous.
The Internet is a tool that can be used for good or ill. The team at 1389 Blog is working hard to do some good: to use the Internet to confront and curb jihadism and expansionist Islam, and to provide knowledge and tools to others who are working to accomplish the same goals. We will never allow anyone to abuse the comments on this blog for the purpose of undermining this effort.
False accusations, mudslinging, and editorial discretion
We have grown especially weary and disgusted with haters who use blogs, comments, forums, Wikis, social news sites, or email to circulate false allegations against others - whether it be public figures, other bloggers, entire groups of people, or whomever else they hate. Despite claims of “fairness” and “impartiality,” disinformation has been planted throughout Wikipedia and other social media, where it becomes fuel for flame wars, mudslinging, and propaganda.
Typically, one or more responders will put in hours or days of unpaid effort to refute those accusations, but then, the malicious accuser simply goes elsewhere and starts the same process all over again.
We have other things to do besides responding to the same falsehoods again and again. If these miscreants can’t win the argument on facts and logic, they hope to win by shouting us down and wasting our time.
Yes - these haters have the right to post what they want - on their own blogs - and to face whatever consequences accrue. When haters commit libel, their victims may sue. When haters incite violence against the persons or groups that they hate, they have passed the boundaries of protected political speech, and we will do what we can to shut them down.
No one has the right to take advantage of other people’s blogs and websites to spew false accusations, obscenities, and bile in front of the readership that reputable bloggers and admins have worked so hard to earn. No one has the right to spam the comments or forum threads on someone else’s website for the purpose of interfering with that website or harassing its owners and participants.
Excluding malicious comments is not censorship - it is vital editorial discretion. No blog or forum administrator - or for that matter, no publisher or media producer - can, or should, publicize every response that comes in. Bigoted ranting, name-calling, bullying and threats, spam, obscenity, incoherent rambles, libel and slander, and ad hominem attacks, attract a lynch-mob mentality, drive away decent readers and participants, and expose the website or organization to repercussions, legal or otherwise. And the endlessly misused argumentum ad Nazium, a/k/a reductio ad Hitlerum, is a signal to readers that the argument has worn itself out, and that intelligent life has departed from that venue.
Oh, and by the way…
If you want to argue with us, you’d better be loaded for bear. We expect to see verifiable evidence and valid logic, presented in a clear and civil manner. Just for starters:
- Calling us liars, racists, Nazis, or whatever else is evidence only of your incivility. Accusing us of being “racists” or “Holocaust deniers” or “fascists” merely because we do not accept your accusations against Jews, Israelis, Serbs, European conservatives, white Americans, or whomever it is you happen to hate, doesn’t cut it either.
- Hearsay, rumors, innuendo, or unconfirmed urban legends, or something you thought you heard from a “friend of a friend,” does not make for sufficient evidence to back up an allegation.
- Articles in Wikipedia are acceptable only for noncontroversial matters, such as technical background, computer and Internet history, and definitions of words and phrases (as shown here in the previous item). But when it comes to controversial political, religious, or historical issues, Wikipedia is far too vulnerable to vandalism, flame wars, and spin, and we generally cannot accept it as evidence. (See our Reference Material resource page, and Byzantine Sacred Art: Wikipedia, the Source of Disinformation, for more on Wikipedia spin jobs.)
- For that matter, we roundly condemn Wikipedia’s self-righteous pretense of enforcing a neutral point of view. It is senseless to make a virtue out of amorality! When we write or blog, we do our best to gather and publish the whole truth and nothing but. There is no neutral ground between right and wrong, between good and evil, between truth and error. There is no room for diluting the truth by presenting falsehood alongside it, in an effort to appear “fair and balanced.” The devil has too many spokesmen already, and too many spokeswomen too!
- Making patronizing remarks, such as claiming that you “pity” us, is nothing more than mudslinging disguised behind a false sense of moral superiority, and it will get your remarks flushed into the spam bucket without a second thought.
- If you, or any of your sources have a vested interest in the issue that could affect credibility, we expect you to disclose it.
- Just because you saw something in the mainstream media does not automatically mean it is true. Many stories, photos, and videos have appeared in the mainstream media and have later been shown to be planted by untrustworthy sources, staged, mislabeled, Photoshopped, or otherwise falsified. Check it first!
In particular, we will not post comments that contain racist or bigoted ranting, especially the anti-Semitic ranting and the Serb-bashing that seems to be plaguing the blogosphere these days. We don’t care how many times you have seen or heard the same piece of Serb-bashing or Jew-bashing or Israel-bashing in the blogosphere or even in the mainstream media. As we have just pointed out, this does NOT make it true, nor does it give you any right to repeat it here.
What’s a blogger or admin to do?
1389 Blog posts a comments policy and we enforce it consistently. Anyone with a modicum of common sense should already be aware of what is acceptable on this and most other blogs. But if you have any doubts, read it before you send us email or comment on this, or any other, post on this blog.
We encourage people to post comments or use the Contact Us form in our blog to expose injustice or other wrongdoing. We have no objection to leveling verifiable accusations against public officials or other culpable individuals, organizations, or governments. We have no objection to polemics or to strong opinions. We encourage readers to engage in vigorous debate and to point out any factual errors that we or other commenters might make. We also encourage readers to investigate and report suspicious incidents and criminal or terrorist activity, and to keep us up to date with that information. But if the accusations cannot be substantiated, the communication in question will be either refuted or deleted.
It is up to us, as bloggers and admins, to maintain civility in our part of the blogosphere. If we fail to make this effort, the better part (in both senses of the word) of our audience will leave. I suggest that it is time for each of us to set up and enforce our comment policies to stop that from happening. And when it comes to dealing with haters, I suggest that we take care neither to let malicious commenters spew their bile until everyone else gives up and lets the haters have the last word, nor to allow false accusations to stand unanswered in any of our comment or forum threads.
Also see:
Technorati : Israel, Nazism, Serbia, anti-Semitism, blogging, comment policy, forum, hate, incivility, injustice, spam, troll, wikis
December 27th, 2007 — Facebook, comment policy, LinkedIn, social media, Blogger.com, Pownce, smiley, trolls, censorware, sites we like, blog censorship, search engine, social news, writing, video, Technorati, Web 2.0, blogging, spam, StumbleUpon, MySpace, Digg, social bookmarking, Slashdot, Wordpress
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(Posted on 1389 Blog - Antijihadist Tech and Fort Hard Knox)
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December 9th, 2007 — 1389 Blog - Antijihadist Tech, smiley, trolls, comment policy, software piracy, spam, privacy, U.S. law, blogging
Readers are free to comment on this blog, subject to comment moderation.
We invite readers to participate and interact. Comments are moderated to exclude incoherent rambles, obscenity, inappropriate ad hominem attacks, commercial spam, and other material that would compromise the quality of this blog. We make an effort to attend to the comment moderation queue frequently, but the process does take some time. We ask that you be patient.
Blog moderation is not censorship.
This is our blog. Were we to allow inappropriate material to be posted, we would face the negative consequences.
We support your right to post what you want on your own blog, and to decide for yourself which comments you want to display on it. If you do not already have a blog, Blogger.com and WordPress.com offer blogs for free!
That said, please be advised of the following:
- 1389 Blog is not a bathroom wall! Comments containing incoherent or unreadable text or data, unjustified personal attacks, unfounded allegations, egregiously vulgar or abusive language, bigoted or racist remarks (especially anti-Semitic remarks), anything xxx-rated, or external links to such objectionable material, will be deleted. If you want your comment to be published, then please refrain from swearing, and express yourself in a civil and cogent manner. If we cannot figure out what you are talking about, we will not post your comment.
- We do not waste our readers’ time with trolls. If you come here merely to stir up enmity, or to heap contempt upon us, our readers, and our work, your comments will be deleted with no further explanation.
- Please make an effort to keep your comments on topic. This is not a general-interest discussion forum. If you wish to communicate with us about something not having to do with a specific blog post, please feel free to use this form. Comments that link to a site having nothing to do with the topic will be deleted and reported as spam.
- If your comment is not displayed immediately, please do not post it repeatedly. Duplicate or repetitive comments are treated as spam and will be deleted.
- Comments that raise complex questions or issues may be kept on hold to be answered later. Some issues deserve to be addressed in a separate blog post, rather than in a comment submerged deep within some other thread. It takes time to prepare such a reply. To display the comment without an answer during that time would make it look as though we were unable or unwilling to address difficult issues. The fact that a comment is held for future reply should not be taken to imply that the comment is being “rejected.” Check your email - we may contact you to let you know that a reply is on its way.
- Commenters are required to identify themselves in some manner. Your usual nickname, screen name, logon ID, or other identifier is just fine; you need not reveal your real name. You must enter an email address, which will not be displayed on the screen. We may use this address to contact you. However, if you enter an email address that is obviously invalid, we may delete your comment. If you wish, you may also enter a website URL.
- Never post anything that you wouldn’t want the entire world to see, perhaps many years from now! Comments are visible to the public without restriction, and, once posted, they remain online indefinitely. Copies of comment text may exist in places that none of us could possibly know about. This blog cannot be responsible for any unwelcome consequences.
- Comments that waste bandwidth or server resources, or that contain anything that interferes with the hosting provider, the blogging software, or other system users, will be deleted.
- Comments are for text, not pictures. If you want to post ASCII art or the like, please get your own blog. If a picture, video, audio file, program, or other non-text element is relevant to the subject matter of the blog post, you may upload the file elsewhere if need be, and post a link to it in your comment.
- Do not paste text directly into the comment box from a WYSIWYG editor, such as a word processor. This can introduce special formatting characters that the comment editor cannot accept. Instead, paste the text into a text-mode editor, such as Notepad, and then recopy and paste it again from there into the comment editor.
- Comments containing anything that violates, or appears to violate, U.S. law will be deleted and the authorities will be notified. This includes, but is not limited to, the following examples:
- Threats against the 1389 Blog team or anyone else.
- Material associated with fraud, malware, plagiarism, software piracy, child porn, or identity theft
- Material that violates anyone’s privacy or that reveals material not authorized for public viewing (with the exception of investigative reporting that is intended to expose wrongdoing)
- Material that promotes jihadism
- Links to external sites containing anything of the above nature.
- Finally, if you think you might be too drunk to comment, you are too drunk to comment!
Blog Administrator 1389
More discussion about blogging and commenting
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November 27th, 2007 — SonicWALL, CzechRebel (author), Czech Republic, leftist-jihadist convergence, censorware, blog censorship, political correctness, Nazism, American South, littlegreenfootballs, smiley, comment policy
All-Too-Revealing Comments
Before we get started on this story, let us remind our readers of some of our policies regarding comments on 1389 Blog. We do not post ad hominem attacks. We do not post repetitive messages. If your grammar is so poor that we can hardly understand what you are trying to say, we may let it go up just for laughs, but don’t count on it. On the other hand, we may let you keep your dignity rather than post your comment for all to see.
Now, we know that we have created quite a stir at LGF because we have gotten more than a few hits off their site recently. But we are surprised to find that Charles Johnson has been unable to locate anybody capable of making a coherent reply to our blog post. It seems as though the recent Stalinesque purges at LGF seem to have caused Charles Johnson to run low on henchmen who can write in the English language. With just about all of the reasonable and intelligent people already banned from LGF, and the rest of them disappearing fast, LGF is scrambling to find someone who can try to answer us.
Charles Johnson’s Quasi-Literate Stooge
To avoid further embarrassment to this bewildered soul, we won’t mention the handle he used. Suffice it to say that he has considerable difficulty with the English language, but he certainly does love Charles Johnson. Let’s look at some of the goofiness that this individual tried to post and you will soon see why it is not displayed on the 1389 Blog.
He began by referring to our primary admin as “Mr. 1389.” 1389 has made it fairly clear, on multiple occasions, that she is a woman. But then, it’s to be expected that an individual who is such a poor writer would also be a poor reader.
Like a typical leftist, he called 1389 and the commenters various names, but he didn’t bother to bring up any evidence or logic to justify his moral posturing.
He accused me of misspelling the word “Czech.” You can check any English-language dictionary and find that the letters C-Z-E-C-H refers to a Slavic people who live mostly in central Europe. The county is now called the Czech Republic. Formerly, it was part of Czechoslovakia. (While you have your dictionary handy, you might want to see that I also know how to spell “Czechoslovakia.”)
The Czech people have made a number of contributions to the fight against totalitarianism, which includes both Nazism and Communism. (See Never Knew that the Church was Orthodox, regarding the Reinhard Heydrich assassination and its grim aftermath.) Hitler referred to Czechoslovakia as a “dagger in the heart of Germany” and infamously demanded that it be given to Germany before the outbreak of World War II.
Going Off the Deep End
The tone of LGF has been changing for months, as many have pointed out. First we saw a sudden interest in searching for cryptic signs of “racism” and “pro-Nazi” sentiments.
Finding cryptic signs of racism is all the rage these days. When I was a boy, an individual who expressed the opinion that a Confederate flag was a symbol of racism would have been deemed fit for the loony bin. It was considered a symbol of heritage and bravery. It carried the message that the federal government was going too far. It was a benign symbol of the South. Seeing a Confederate flag was like hearing “welcome home, ya’ll.” In the 1970s, some very radical elements of the civil rights movement started to express misgivings about the flag’s meaning, although this didn’t really take hold until the 1990s. (Note that the radical elements who came up with this canard all seemed to live in the North.)
Today, even some reasonably intelligent people try to associate the flag with racial tensions. But this is rooted in modern-day leftist political correctness–not in historical fact. Against such a backdrop, it is no surprise that Charles Johnson-or anyone who is equally ill-informed about a topic-might read cryptic racial messages into just about anything.
Merely owning and/or displaying a symbol does not mean that the individual doing so endorses what the symbol stands for. For example, my daughter recently inherited a belt that dates back to World War I. One of her great-grandfathers decorated the belt with medals that he had removed from the bodies of dead German soldiers. My daughter is very proud of the belt and plans to display it in her home. That does not mean that she admires the German military or endorses the policies of Kaiser Wilhelm II; it means she is proud of her family’s heritage, including three great-grandfathers who fought for the Allies during World War I.
Yet, Charles Johnson points to a photo of a man with a Celtic cross on his bookshelf and calls it “proof” of the man’s fascist leanings. Of course, Celtic crosses were around long before fascism. Many Irish people were buried under them centuries ago. Nonetheless, anyone who relates to their Celtic heritage and displays the traditional Celtic cross is a proven fascist in Charles Johnson’s mind-because he wants to see it that way. And Charles holds the same opinion of anybody who has been seen with such a “proven fascist,” or seen with any of that person’s acquaintances, and so ad infinitum. There is a ridiculously long chain of “contamination” here, which reminds us of children passing along imaginary “cooties” on a playground, along with other, much less benign, imagery.
Loyalty and the War on Censorship
We are proud to say that 1389 Blog has been in the forefront of the war against censorship of conservative and antijihadist blogs. When “censorware” firms such as SonicWALL, banned LGF and other blogs, 1389 Blog helped lead the charge to lift the ban.
What has LGF ever done for 1389 Blog? Oh, it banned 1389 without even the courtesy of giving a reason.
So, Charles Johnson can be no friend to anyone. He repays favors with stabs in the back.
LGF and Charles Johnson Refuse to Fight Real Nazis Who Preach Hate and Murder
Not long ago, 1389 Blog exposed a Croatian Nazi rock singer named “Thompson” who had been scheduled to tour the US and Canada. Too bad Little Green Footballs never bothered to publish anything about it. No doubt about this rock singer’s Nazi identity-he was, and is, an open and notorious proponent of murdering some of the very same people that Hitler had tried to exterminate sixty years ago. To put icing on the cake, just like his predecessors back in the day, this “Thompson” was all buddy-buddy with Muslims and never even hinted about doing them any harm.
Given the readership that LGF enjoys (at least until recently), Charles Johnson could have put some real obstacles in the path of this thug. But Charles Johnson and LGF sat on their hands, letting “Thompson” tour America and Canada preaching hate and violence without a word of reproach. So, don’t ever think that Charles Johnson actually feels that real, live Nazis are “repugnant.” In fact, through his silence, and even through his banning of 1389, he is enabling the nefarious efforts of those Nazis.
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June 23rd, 2007 — forum, comment policy, tech tips, spam, Web 2.0, wikis, blogging
Sooner or later, every forum moderator, blogger, blog admin, wiki organizer, or Web 2.0 aficionado will have to confront the issue of comment spammers. There are no easy answers. Posting a comment policy statement, such as that shown under the About page tab, may help to discourage human-generated spam, but ‘bot-generated spam will require other measures.
Here are some articles on the topic that may be helpful:
Sometimes, though, the bloggers and webmasters themselves are to blame for degrading the quality of the blogosphere:
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