“Jon, your post at Comment Management Responsibility: A Proposal is very detailed and thought provoking, as well as way more comprehensive than anything I’d thought so far. You’ve broken things down with a lot of detail about assertions a blogger might want to make about his or her comment policy.”

Thought it might interest you as well.

The question is whether it would be useful to create some shared policy that would help boggers deal with the edge cases that can be unpleasant and time consuming. What I’m hearing from the blogosphere is that any such move smacks of rampant conformity, censorship, and authoritarianism, and should be avoided at all costs.

The problem is that it’s difficult to figure out whether they’re against Tim’s suggested rules, Tim himself for being arrogant enough to suggest them, the very concept of shared codes of conduct, or all three (I think it’s the latter in most cases)

As I said in my own post, everyone has their own internal thermostat for what’s tolerable; since its their own blog, they’re welcome to set it at whatever they please.

As long as you’re consistent with what rules you’ve set out for comments, I don’t think it should be a problem enforcing it — which makes it particularly important, if you *are* going to enforce it, to state those rules publicly.

And as for it applying to comments and not posts, I suppose you’re right about that; however, its hard to imagine that someone would say “no racist or abusive comments”, and then turn around and write something racist or abusive in their posts.

I’m not sure if their audience would tolerate that kind of incongruency — nor, if the author decided to violate the spirit and letter of his own stated comments policy in writing comments of his own.

Cheers
t @ dji