Well, we’re 700+ posts into this website (can you believe it?!?) and we think it’s about time we finally implemented a comment policy.  Why now? Well, in the recent past many of our posts have become the target of comment spammers… and we’re tired of it.  Will a simple policy fix it? Probably not totally, but we hope folks will take it seriously.  So here goes!

First… We love most comments! What’s a good comment? It’s one that adds to the conversation, or just says something nice about what we’ve written. It’s even those comments that challenge what we write, or disagree with us altogether.  80% of all the comments we get are these type of comments…

What’s a Bad Comment?

So what’s a bad comment? Well, that’s easy too:

1. Any comment left for the primary purpose of selling a product or service, or otherwise getting someone to leave this site to go to another one, where that other site earns money on the visit, or
2. Any comment that is inflammatory, or otherwise nasty.

What Not to Do…

If you’re leaving a comments like this, you know who you are… but we’ll give you some specifics:

1. Don’t leave comments where the name in the comment is not the name of the author, but rather a product or service. For instance, a comment where the name field is Single Bathroom Vanities and the link goes back to a place that sells bathroom vanities would violate this policy. We’ll either spam that comment (which removes it and reports the URL and e-mail to a central spam elimination authority), or we’ll unlink it.  Either way, it’s a waste of our time.
2. Don’t leave comments with links in the comment that are designed to move people away from this site to another site. The only exception to this policy is if the other link legitimately adds to the conversation… For instance, if we make a claim that another site clearly refutes, linking out to that site would be fine.
3. Don’t leave comments that are inflammatory.

There are a few grey areas that are pretty standard in the blogging world that are OK. Here’s one: let’s say you run the blog Designs by Jane, and your name is Jane. It’s fine to use a name like Jane @ Designs by Jane. Now, if you’re trying to push picture frames on your blog, and intead of using Jane @ Designs by Jane, you use Jane @ Cool Picture Frames, that wouldn’t be OK, because Cool Picture Frames isn’t the name of your blog.

So that’s pretty simple right?  We thought so…

(photo credit: celluar immunity ^[1])