Obnoxious Comments

I need to take a moment to rant about people abusing the privilege of posting comments to this blog. I had an episode today that requires a response by me.

Note to the Nathan Bedford Forrest fan who apparently doesn’t like my take on his boy: you do NOT get to insult me on my own web site and expect me to approve your comments so that they are posted for the world to see.

Feel free to disagree with me. I welcome the challenge. Feel free to use facts to demonstrate to me where I’m wrong. I’m usually the first to admit that I’m wrong and tip my hat to the person who points it out. However, if you really expected me to approve comments where you personally insulted me, you clearly are smoking something less than legal.

For the rest of my regular readers: this particular individual, whom I have never heard of before today, doesn’t like my take on Forrest and attempted to post some really personally insulting stuff in the comments section to this blog. Stuff to the gist of “you don’t agree with me, so you must be an idiot,” only more insulting and far more snide. The beauty of this, of course, is that this is my web site. I pay for it, so I get to make the rules. One the most basic, most fundamental rules is: people who are not related to me do NOT get the privilege of insulting me on my own web site. If that somehow infringes upon First Amendment free speech rights, sorry about your luck. Consequently, I exercised my prerogative and deleted the guy’s comments.

Those of you who’ve been around here for a while know that I welcome dialogue and that I readily admit it when I’m wrong. I find the give and take fascinating, and I really enjoy it. That sort of exchange will always be welcome here. However, please use some common sense. If you’re going to launch a personal attack on me, you can reasonably expect that I won’t appreciate it, welcome it, or react very well to it. Call me crazy if you like, but those are the rules on MY web site.

The comments are set so that anyone who hasn’t posted a comment previously must have their comment approved by me before it will be seen by anyone but me. Once you’ve passed that muster, they post automatically, but you have to earn that privilege. And it is just that–a privilege. It’s not a right. Needless to say NBF Boy won’t be getting that privilege.

There is only one thing that pisses me off more: people spamming my blog. There’s this lovely little trend of companies trying to insert spam in the comments section of blogs using spam bots, and I get several every day (three today). I’ve taken to reporting the spamming to their Internet service providers as their reward for wasting my time. Just my little way of returning the favors.

Sorry for the rant, but people abusing the comments section to this blog really anger me.