Samuel's Blog

Another Editorial Policy Post

January 21st, 2006 at 01:31am

I posted this as a comment over here, but I think it will be more useful as a general announcement. I am becoming annoyed at having to make these announcements, but please read and abide or go elsewhere.

I retain editorial control over this site, I will delete useless comments, especially when they are offtopic. What I am seeing at the moment is that a few people are taking every chance they can to leave comments on various subjects which do not correspond to the post they are attached to.

I don’t want to censor people, but useless and annoying comments will be deleted.

I’m sorry if this inconveniences you, but there is nothing stopping you from starting your own site if you want to talk about stuff which I don’t. There are plenty of free webshosts and blogging services out there for you to choose from.

For the record, I am making a financial loss from this site and my podcast. That doesn’t concern me, because the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages of the cost. What does bother me is seeing me lose control of something which I pay to maintain and dedicate a lot of time to.

One thing I have noticed about bigger blogs and forums is that they tend to have a lot of useless comments from people who couldn’t give a toss about the topic, and instead feel like posting garbage to websites. Some of the bigger forums have an advantage in that they generally have a bunch of admins and moderators who can deal with that and set the general tone of the site. I do not have that luxury, this is a one person operation, and I can’t be here 24/7 to maintain it. Therefore it is important that I set the tone when I am here, so that it carries over to when I’m not.

Sometimes I am forced to take measures that I don’t like, and have been criticised for previously, but if I don’t make these decisions then this site would spiral out of control and I would be likely to not renew the site hosting.

There are other blogs which run successfully without comments. Whilst thay might work here, I suspect it would remove a large portion of the readership. One of the key aspects of this site is the discussion, and I find a lot of it to be interesting, but I still need to retain control over it so that things run smoothly. I don’t want to lose visitors because I can’t control the comments…that would be a disaster, so I control the comments to the extent that I stop childish behaviour, and spam-like comments.

I appreciate you reading the site, and I appreciate you leaving comments, but if you cross the line in my view as site owner, then you will be forced to take action. I’m not going to ban anyone for disagreeing with me, but I will ban people who continually post rubbish.

This site is here for me to have fun, not to spend hours deleting rubbish. If you can’t deal with that, then go elsewhere.

Samuel

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