Battling Blogasites
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Monday, May 17, 2004 at 01:47 PM [GMT-6]

Any blogger will tell you that the decision to permit comments is a difficult one. The vast majority of commenters (commentors?) are polite, on-topic and welcome. Unfortunately, there are inevitably those who abuse the privilege.

The most egregious offenders are commercial spammers who leave perfunctory comments on posts solely to get their links and product-related text indexed by search engines. These folks are increasing in number and I've noticed that a number of blogs have turned off their comment capabilities in response to the continuing onslaught of commercial spam. I don't blame them, and it's a shame that it's come to that.

However, there's a second class of commentor (commenter?) comprised of people who are actually less sympathetic figures (to a blog owner) than commercial spammers. I use the term "blogasite" to describe these people. They either attempt to bend a blog's discussion to their own purposes via comments, or to engage in outright subversion of the blog owner's desires. Thankfully, this second type is much less common.

I did, however, encounter just such a creature this morning, and it's left me with a bad attitude. This person intentionally violated blogging ethics and abused my hospitality in allowing access to make comments. As a result, I've taken the unprecedented step of deleting the comments outright and banning the IP address to prevent this person from making future comments here.

That sounds extreme...and it is. I would be more willing to cut a newbie some slack, but this person has been around long enough to know basic blogging etiquette, and they did what they did intentionally.

I suspect that this person is now whining on another blog about how unfair I am. My advice is to take a deep breath, consider why your actions were inappropriate, and then think twice before trying to take advantage of a blogger's hospitality. If you want to email me to discuss the specifics privately, I'm happy to oblige.