Spammers and Comment Policy
I never fully explained why I went off on the guy mentioned in the earlier entry, and I just wanted to clear things up. I suppose while I’m at it I ought to throw up the Official Standard Mischief Comment Policy.
Normally I don’t think it’s cool to post the details of a commenter, his IP, address and whatnot. Before I did so, I did take pains to make sure he was a spammer. In this go-around, Tam (extra bonus snarky) and Xavier (thanks for the linkage!), and a whole crapload of other bloggers that sometimes post gun content got spammed. He seems to have manually spammed everyone, probably by just arriving via someone’s blog roll and posting the exact same comment on the very top blog entry. That’s why I hunted him down. Just for the record, although he didn’t post his full legal name, home address, phone or fax number, he didn’t take any great pains to hide them either. That’s good that he’s just a wackjob, because if he was selling anything beyond his crackpot fruitcake screed, I’d probably spread his personal information far and wide. All spammer must die.
So here are the draft comment posting rules:
1. Comments are welcome and encouraged. The comment form requires a name and email address. Email addresses are never shown. You are free to make up a pseudonymous name and/or an obviously fake email address, but if you do, please use the same ones so I can tell if someone tries to impersonate you.
2. This is not a free speech zone. If you want free speech, get your own damn forum. That being said, I will bend over backwards to keep your dissenting non-spam comments posted.
3. I’d prefer if you can manage to get your point across with a minimum of swear words. It’s not like crap like that phases me, but I think that people tend to skip over comments where the writer can’t control himself enough to type ?fsck? instead of ?fuck?.
4. No spam, no spambots. You must post your comments using a browser, not a bot.
5. Post unique comments only. If you go around to other blogs and post substantially the same comments, don’t be surprised if I spank you.
6. Comments should at least tangentially related to the subject at hand. If not, then they should be at least somewhat related to where the other comments in the same thread have wandered off to.
7. If you leave me a comment like ?great web design, oh and I agree with you completely on that.? and just happen to link to your \/iagra blog, or leave an email address like strattera@jbpuckcfw.crap or leave comments like ?Good Luck! buy phentermine carisoprodol phentermine online!?, don’t be surprised when Spam Karma 2 spanks your comment.
8. As soon as I move to 2.0 here, and I can figure out the comments database, I plan to write something to zero out the IP address of any comment in the database for longer than 30 days or so. I’d feel so much better not keeping your intimate access details around.
9. Unfortunately, it seems I don’t have anything approaching the equivalent to the mainstream media’s ?shield laws?. I probably won’t go to jail to keep from turning over your contact details to the Overlords, were they to serve me with some kind of legal crap.
10. WordPress sends you cookies. I don’t fully understand everything WordPress uses the cookies for, but I’m not doing anything weird with them. Feel free to upchuck them at the end of your session. I do.
Subject to change at any time, blah blah blah…
