Commenting

Commenting Guidelines

Hi and welcome to my blog.

I welcome you to join in and comment on postings and reply to comments that other people have left. I welcome lively debate and both agreement and disagreements to my thoughts.

Moderation
Firstly let me apologise that I moderate "every" comment. This means that whenever you leave a comment on one of my posts, I get an email allowing me to publish the comment. Sometimes, because of time differences or because I may not be able to clear my emails right now (in a meeting or perhaps driving, or its the middle of the night here), it might be a while before you see your comment published.

What Comments do you Discard and what do you Publish?
Generally I only discard Spam, which means that I discard 99.999% of comments.

I allow pretty much every comment that is genuine and not spam, even if it goes against my own views. So far, there has only been a single time when I discarded a comment because it was written in an extremely derogatory nature. In that case I asked the person to rewrite the comment and I would have published it.

But your article is really stupid!
Yes, I will allow comments that tell me that I'm wrong. I am often wrong as I write my own opinions and these can sometimes be very wrong. I don't write blogs because I know it all, I write to learn and in doing so, sometimes I can be corrected and that's great. I enjoy learning from others. All I ask is for you to please be nice about it.

Spam
Sorry about moderating posts, but as I get a huge amount of spam I am forced into this situation. I'd much rather that comments be published immediately and I can then check them in the morning. Unfortunately because of the gigantic amount of spam, your enjoyment would be destroyed if I allowed comments to be published immediately.

You would simply not believe the amount of canned responses that come along the lines of

your article is wondrous and has enlightened me with sandals for sale at cheap prices"

 or

A dulcet article will let you travel broadens the mind because the article is true, make us move and laugh. When I catched sight of this article, I deem I can reap these.... My friends all buy my well priced boots and are excellent happy. 

For a long while I got disillusioned and switched off the ability to leave comments altogether but realised that this was defeating the purpose of having a community and discussion with readers. So now I simply moderate every comment before it is published.

Can I leave a link?
Yes, but only if it doesn't come across as Spam. Very very sadly, I have had to remove this agreement due to the absolute huge amount of pure spam attempting to get around this issue. The tremendous number of "I totally agree with your view, (link)Somewhere software development at great prices(unlink)" that I get filling up my inbox is sadly, now a normal daily clearance.

If you are genuine, but think that I may have incorrectly deleted your comment, please please please get in touch with me using the "Contact Me" form on the sidebar.

But I really want to say more...
Great. Please get in touch with me using the "Contact Me" form on the sidebar and explain. I'd love you to be a guest poster to write an article on this site. It gets a lot of hits.

Steve