RECENT COMMENTS

about comments (02)

As the traffic and commentary has greatly increased around here recently, I would like to clarify the site policy on commenting.

As has been said before, I do not want this site to become a bastion of negativity and sarcasm. This is a locally centered community site, covering a specific geographic area. I do not want to let the worst behaviors of the internet spoil what we have going here. Towards that end, I have discovered that there are certain small limits that we have to accept to keep the environment both open and broadly civil.

Anonymous comments are ok and useful, if not abused. They work best, in the context of this site, if you limit yourself to as few pseudonyms as necessary. There are anonymous folks that post quite frequently, but as a reader I have a sense of what they are all about because they regularly use the same pseudonym. As a follow-up to that, posting bunches of comments under multiple names in the same discussion is confusing. Please do not abuse the ability to post anonymously.

Very spiteful comments, if posted completely anonymously and lacking other merit, might be deleted. By “completely anonymously” I mean using a fake name AND providing a fake email address.

Attempting to pretend to be someone else, ie posting a comment as Doug Wilder or Delores McQuinn or one of the other folks that comments here regularly is a no-no.

The first time that you post a comment from a given name/email/ip address combination, it will flagged for screening. Ditto if you include links in your comment. This is to weed out the automated spam comments that keep trying to slip through.

Any changes or later clarifications will be spelled out on the site use / disclaimer/ etc page.