Tag Archives: Comments

Comment Policy

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I hate having to spell this out, but I’ve had to delete several comments over the last couple of weeks from people who just couldn’t resist insulting other commenters, or the blog authors, or half the Flash fanbase.

From here on out, this is the official Speed Force comment policy. Ready?

1. Be polite.

That’s it. Don’t insult people. Don’t dismiss their opinions out of hand (for instance, by declaring that they only hold an opinion because they like that Flash better). If someone makes a statement with 5 supporting points, and you disagree, and your response hinges on one of those points being wrong, address it instead of just saying “My ninja just beat up your Flash, therefore your argument is invalid.” Disagreeing is fine. Just be respectful of the other person when you do it.

In short, Don’t be a jerk.

Stolen from Inspired by the Bad Astronomy Comment Policy.

Site Stability & Comments

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So, yeah, the site’s been having some stability problems. Dreamhost has changed some settings to deal with disk issues, but the new settings require more memory, and it’s just been one big swallow-the-spider-to-catch-the-fly experience. It’s mostly working at this point, but if you end up having problems loading the site or making a comment, please let me know by email at speedforce at pobox.com or on Twitter at @speedforceorg.

Also, a lot of comment spam has been slipping through the last couple of days. It’s mostly the “I found your site on Google and this is such a fascinating analysis” type of robot-generated flattery (even on things like linkposts) that quietly links back to the spamvertised site. I’ve been clearing it out as quickly as I can, but they keep posting at times like when I’m on the road or in a meeting at work, etc.

The upshot is that I’ve turned on moderation for now. I don’t like to pre-moderate everything because that can slow down discussion, but I’ve set it to let through returning commenters and hold comments from new people until I have a chance to review them.

Comment Issues

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Comment threading is enabled now, so you can now reply to a specific comment on a post and have it appear below it and indented — just like on LiveJournal or WordPress.com. See the comments on this post for an example.

The downside is that it required some changes to the theme, some of which I missed initially. If you’ve visited the site in the last few days, you may have seen some comments showing up in unreadable light yellow-on-white. That should be taken care of now, but if you still see it, just hit reload and it should be fine.

Technical note: It was a caching issue. New visitors, or anyone who hit reload, would get the updated stylesheet, but anyone who had visited the site recently would see it displayed with their local copy of the old version. After I realized this, I renamed the stylesheet to make sure that all visitors would get a fresh copy.