QOTD: If you have a blog, do you have a “Comment Policy”?

I read a lot of blogs. I find it both recreational and educational. I read many different types of blogs, although I must admit much of my blog-reading is centered around technology of some sort. Often, the content I’m presented is part of an aggregate of many blogs, so often I find myself reading blogs I don’t necessarily subscribe to directly.

Today I came across an article and was reading it, and noticed in the comments the author (of the blog, not the comment) had not only moderated a comment, but left a note – something to the effect of “Nice Try” and then pointed to his “Comment Policy” which I’ve included below:

* I moderate everything.
* Any attempts to drop flamebait, attacks or insults will be removed.
* Any pointless “good job” comments will be removed.
* Constructive comments that improve the discussion will be allowed and responded to.

Not too long after that I checked back on that thread of comments, and I noticed that after the discussion was getting further away from the (blog) author’s point of view that comments were suddenly closed altogether. This got me to thinking. If you are going to have a blog, why would you want to censor your readers comments? Why would you *only* want to have comments seen that agree with you? I love discussion, and I (sometimes) thrive on disagreement – that’s how minds are changed, and often times I’ve learned my biggest lessons in life through respectful disagreement!

That whole episode got me to thinking about my own site. I do, sadly, have comment moderation activated here on my site. It’s not because I only want to approve content that I agree with, but because I don’t want my readers to be subjected to porn links, spam and possibly spyware and adware (should they be on a Windows machine ). I do approve every legit comment that comes through regardless of whether I agree with the comment or not. I have had an exception where something actually got caught as “Spam” when it shouldn’t have been, but that is rare, because there are often times it doesn’t catch stuff that is obvious.

So please, should you comment on an article on my site, and not see it show up within a reasonable amount of time, please contact me at ask.jaysonr (at) gmail.com so that I can check on the status of your comment for you. I normally try get to them in a timely manner as I do want to hear (and allow others to hear/read) what you have to say, and I always respect a differing opinion.