Professional Idiots
I’m always a little astonished when “professionals” come to my websites and disrespect my operations, violate our User Guidelines and just act like idiots in general. In the last half hour, here is a prime example.
We had a guy who left a comment on YanksBlog.com. His comment was inflammatory and vulgar and was deleted in accordance with our User Guidelines. Open and shut - a very easy call on my part. He left a comment asking why his comment was deleted. Of course, that was deleted in line with our User Guidelines (no comments relating to comment deletions, etc.). Open and shut again. I contacted him and politely informed him as to the violations in his comments as is standard procedure on my sites - and many others. His response to this was name calling. He’ll never visit my site, I’m a “Nazi pig” and “long live free speech a******.” He left another comment at YB that I am sure I do not need to describe, as well. Real men died in real wars against real Nazis to allow this guy to call me a “Nazi pig.” Ok, so this is nothing new. Just another idiot online.
But, I looked at his e-mail address and found it has a unique domain name attached to it. Went to the site and found a law firm in Alabama (Mobile and Birmingham). Turns out he’s a “partner.” He’s 38 years old. And, apparently, he likes to play a big man online by personally attacking owners of websites with actual guidelines that don’t allow him to act however he wants. I don’t understand anyone who acts like this. But, a 38 year old attorney? I mean, yes, I’ve always said that idiocy knows no age and bad people come in all shapes and sizes, but does he just assume that he can go around mistreating people and it never will catch up with him? I wonder.
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June 19th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Well, maybe you’ve heard the saying…
"You can take the girl out of the trailer park but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl."
Its the same principle. You can’t change people’s behavior or attitude (or prejudices, etc.) by adding education.
I wonder if his partners at the law firm would condone his actions though….
June 19th, 2006 at 10:18 am
Very true.
August 10th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
There was a comment by a user calling him or herself romablog from romablog.blogspot.com. As this entry is more than 14 days out, their comment was moderated, but when I went to approve it, it wasn’t there, so I must have deleted it by accident. Sorry about that. They posted:
"Why is there a rule against posting about deleted comments? that wouldn’t really clog the boards up.
Worried about the image?"
August 10th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
No, it’s more to do with running the site in an efficient manner. Comment deletions are not a public matter. YanksBlog.com is a privately owned website that has a set of User Guidelines that dictate what is allowed in comments. We consider the deletion of comments very seriously and don’t just delete comments with no thought or consideration. If it’s a violation, it’s deleted. If not, it’s not. We are strict and I will never say otherwise. We are a different type of blog and I believe that that is one of the things that makes us special. But, no blog, community or website is for everyone and that should never be forgotten.
If anyone has an issue with a comment being deleted, they are welcome to contact me and I will take a look at it and explain it, assuming that they don’t act like a total idiot. I’m happy to do so. And, as I said above, when someone posts a comment about their comment being deleted, I routinely e-mail them to explain after I delete the comment. They aren’t ignored.
We have specific goals for YB and we operate in line with those. Comment deletions are really matters that only I can deal with, since I have access to all of the related information and reasoning. So, that is one reason I want people to e-mail me because I’m the one that needs to see their message. I can sometimes miss comments, but it’s harder for me to miss e-mails. And, actually, it can clog up the comments, depending on the traffic levels of the site. We don’t really want site related matters in our comments, we want them to be focused on the entry in some way or another.