This page supersedes my original comments policy. The tone here may seem stern and harsh, but very rarely has any of this been a problem.
I love comments and I love interacting with readers. However, I do not love obnoxiousness, rudeness, or variants thereof. This being the case, commenters should note the following:
1. No anonymous comments are allowed here. Sorry, but those are the rules.
2. My comments are not your blog. Period. (Thanks to Ragnell for that particular formulation.) Be careful about how you post. Comments may be there for other readers as a tool to interact with me, but comments are still a part of this blog, and as this is my blog, I and I alone get to decide what appears here. Not a single word will appear in this space that I have not approved, whether it's written by me or by someone else.
3. Comment moderation is on. This means that comments will be held in a moderation queue until I decide to publish them. I check on this a number of times throughout the day, but I can go several hours without checking, so if your comment doesn't appear, be patient. (Sometimes comments do slip through cracks, which results in them not being forwarded to my G-mail. If you have a comment that you feel wasn't obnoxious that never appeared, drop me a line.)
4. Commenting behavior that will result in comments being rejected include: personal attacks, off-topic rambling (stick to the subject of the post at hand, please), attempts to sneak political discussion into topics that aren't political, and general obnoxiousness.
5. Repeated instances of behaviors listed in Item #4 may result in you being banned from commenting. If I decide to ban someone from commenting, there is no notice, no warning, no nothing. I will simply stop publishing your comments and, in all likelihood, delete them unread. Your only indication that you have been banned will be that your comments are not showing up after a reasonable period of time. Appeals for commenting leniency will not be entertained; once I decide that you're not worth my time, you are not worth my time. Forever.
(Currently, Blogger's commenting system does not require e-mail addresses for commenting, nor does it allow me to ban commenters so their comments are automatically rejected. If I ever have ongoing problems, I may switch to a commenting system that does allow me to do those things.)
6. File under "general obnoxiousness" things like trying to shame me into publishing comments on the basis of free speech and trying to shame me into publishing comments because I need to be exposed to "other points of view". In the former case, you are as free as a bird to start your own blog if you want to say whatever you want. I am under no obligation to give you a forum to say anything you wish. And in the latter case, I consider various points of view on things before I post. If you want to engage in interesting and intelligent debate, that's one thing. If your goal is to try and make my blog "fair and balanced", well, tough. I owe opposing viewpoints their careful consideration. I owe you nothing.
7. Sometimes I will decide to close comments on a particular post (if conversation is going in a direction I don't much like), or not allow comments in the first place. Some commenters may try to "work around" this by commenting on that post in a different comment thread. Do not do this.
8. Exceptions to the above will almost always take the form of comments that are personal attacks on me, and which are also stupid and/or poorly written. Comments like these may well be featured in a front-page post, for other, more intelligent, and literate commenters to mock. If you feel it necessary to tell me I'm a fat poopyhead, think about how stupid you want to look.
9. A word on e-mail: I love e-mail too, and if you are more comfortable contacting me that way than by commenting, feel free -- addresses are in the sidebar. My default position is that all e-mails are publishable, unless you specifically ask me to do something else (either not publish at all, or publish as "an anonymous e-mailer"). Let me know when e-mailing me, unless you don't care. (And remember, just because I treat all unspecified e-mails as publishable doesn't mean that I publish all of them!)
OK, that should about cover it all. Feel free to comment!
