j's scratchpad

I noticed the Redhead has posted some new rules about comments on her blog. Reading the text of the post and the comments reminded me about a post I’ve been considering for a while about editing, altering, and/or deleting comments on blogs. A survey I took about a week ago had some questions about changing comments on blogs, but in their list of answers, they didn’t have why I edit comments as a choice. Sometimes I will edit someone’s comment, not to change the editorial content necessarily, but perhaps to make a URL a live link or something along those lines. If you become a member of the blog, you can edit your comment by logging in, finding your comment in the discussion group, and editing it there.

I have deleted comments before. Since I provide this blog primarily as a professional development resource and some people might read this blog at work, I try to keep the content in line with what might be appropriate in a work environment. I have removed some inappropriate comment spam and some sexually explicit comments from my blog that added nothing to the editorial content I try to provide for my readers. I think I might have also deleted offensive language from someone’s comment once, too, but I can’t remember for certain.

I’ve noticed a trend of using a bogus e-mail address to post a comment on this blog. Although I’m sure I’ve seen comments without e-mail addresses before, I couldn’t figure out how to comment without giving an e-mail address. If you provide an e-mail address and no name, the server will post the comment without an active link to the e-mail address. (Does it seem as silly to you as it does to me that the blog requires an e-mail address, but not a name?) An e-mail address is something the server requires and I cannot change, unfortunately.

One quirk about this server, too, is that it links comments and people’s identities by e-mail addresses. If you use the same e-mail address, but a different name, all of the earlier comments magically change to the different name. If some of you use the same e-mail address, like those of you who use  xyz at xyz.com, to comment on the blog, someone’s identity will change.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2004 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.