If you leave a comment here, it should show up almost instantly. If you don’t see it within a few hours, or it disappears, please let me know. I don’t moderate comments. If for some reason I need to delete your comment and you’ve left a valid email address, I’ll send an email explaining why I did it. I got an email a few days ago from someone who’s comment didn’t appear, which is why I’m mentioning this now.
The problem is I use a program called Akismet to delete spam comments, and it sometimes makes a mistake. If you tell me your comment didn’t show up, I can hunt it down and bring it back. If I didn’t use Akismet, I would get around 1600 spam comments a month! So I have to use it, and I have to accept sometimes it makes mistakes. Every real comment here is important however, so I don’t want to lose any.
Akismet learns from mistakes, so if I find a comment it deleted by mistake, it’s less likely to happen again. In this way, if you tell me about a lost comment, you are doing me a favor as well as others who leave comments on Akismet blogs. Your future comments will also be less likely to get lost on other blogs in this way as well.
General Comment Policies
Since I’ve been around 5 years now, I have a pretty set policy on comments that probably isn’t very different from most other blogs. For the sake of clarity, I’ll just explain it a bit here.
Anonymous comments are welcome. The name, email address and URL fields are all optional. It’s always nice however if you choose some name, even if it’s not your real one.
In general everything goes except spam. You do however have to address the topic at hand.
While you can say anything you want, you can’t be intentionally disruptive, especially in a repetitive way. In particular, if you have a very strong disagreement with me, this isn’t the place to get into a long discussion about it. It’s better if you find some place else on the Internet to talk about it and leave a link from here. While your opinions are welcome, most people who read this blog are in general agreement with me on most things, and they would find a very long and rambling statement opposing me disruptive. This happened once for example when I posted about the relationship between eating meat and climate change, and someone wanted to spend a lot of time here talking about the virtues of an all-meat diet. I generally won’t delete comments like this, but will ask you to move on.
This isn’t the right place to talk about very divisive and emotional issues like guns, abortion or religion.
Both myself and others have the right to leave their opinion here. Requests to remove what I’ve written or comments from others will not be honored, and you won’t make any friends here this way either.
Within reason swearing is okay. I don’t much myself, but if you care to you’re welcome.
If you post something illegal, I might have to delete it.
While spam is not allowed, I offer a little more latitude to hand typed commercial comments that address the topic at hand. For example this Chinese company that produces a seeder that competes with one I posted about:
http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/2006/09/earthway-seeder/
If you hand type something that’s creative and relevant, I’ll probably allow it. Entertainment value is extra credit. This is completely at my discretion.
What’s not allowed is a commercial comment that’s in stride with the topic at hand, or one that’s just a link or otherwise is not in any way creative or useful. Of all the comments I ever delete, they almost all fall into this category. Again, if you leave a valid email address I’ll get in touch and explain why I deleted your comment.
Comments anyone?
Ok Pat, I’ll behave from now on. =:-P~