I have decided to try allowing unmoderated comments on this blog.
What this means is, if you wish to leave a comment on a particular post, your comment will be immediately accepted without any delay, with one proviso: the post in question must have been published within the previous 14 days.
Until now, I had to manually read and accept all comments, which was causing quite a delay especially since I am located in Australia. Since I have had a request from a reader to enable unmoderated comments, I have thought about it and have decided to give it a go. This will allow discussions to progress much more easily and rapidly, making the blog more user-friendly.
The comments left on this blog tend to be of a very high quality and extremely useful to students of languages. Several of the regular readers of this blog are language creators themselves and are highly respected inventors. We also have readers fluent in many different native languages who can comment on, and offer advice regarding, aspects of those languages. Allowing real-time comments hopefully will increase and facilitate such valuable discussions from which we can all benefit and from which we can all learn.
However, there is unfortunately also a significant risk of spam, vandalism, and inappropriate comments; if any of these problems occur to a significant degree then I will go back to only allowing moderated comments.
Any comments of an offensive nature will be removed.
Comments advertising or marketing commercial products will be removed, except if the product concerned is clearly relevant to the specific post to which the comment is attached. That is, if the intent of the comment is clearly to be helpful rather than to indiscriminately spam, then that is fine.
Similarly, I respectfully ask that people please do not randomly tag posts with very short, spam-like comments promoting your favourite constructed language, without first reading the post to see if the comment has any relevance to the topic being discussed. Again, if your intention is clearly to be helpful rather than to indiscriminately spam, then that is fine. But please be aware that comments clearly intended as spam advertising for a language may be removed.
I also respectfully ask that if people wish to have very intense, adversarial discussions they should please take those discussions to a more suitable forum; this is a place only for friendly, polite, cooperative discussion.
Everyone is very welcome to promote their favourite constructed languages by providing specific information about those languages which clearly relates to the topic being discussed in the post at hand. Such interesting and worthwhile discussion is what this blog is all about, after all.
So: welcome, come in, join in the friendly discussion, and enjoy...
The Joy of Languages
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ReplyDeleteJust joking. I think it'll work out just fine.
By the way, it's August so Idists are meeting in Tübingen as we speak.
Thank you Robert, we'll do our best to make it work well. We, the followers, only get to see the constructive comments, so we haven't much idea how much crap you have to filter out -- ie how many comments are you needing to reject every day.
ReplyDeleteOne Mithridates' blog, on the right side bar, he has the most recent comments appear in a list. Such a feature could make it easier for you to spot inappropriate comments right away. Or for regular followers of your blog to spot the nasty posts and they can inform you right away.
Or is it possible to have a deputy moderator, who can be trusted to pull down spam ASAP? Maybe someone on the other side of the world so you have more time zone coverage.
@Mithridates: Thanks, I learned a new word there: derp!
ReplyDelete@David Parke: I'll see how it goes for a while. Hopefully it will all be fine with the current low-tech solution. There are some amazing commenting-utilities one can use, such as IntenseDebate, which do all manner of amazing things so bewildering it would take me a month just to read the instructions. Apparently they even make coffee. It's like having an automated deputy moderator.
On a different topic, I hope the Ido conference goes well and I wish them every success.