Saturday, March 25, 2017

Book Blogger Hop March 24th - March 30th: Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Norm Coleman, and Ruth Bader-Ginsburg All Attended P.S. 197 in Brooklyn, New York


Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: How do you handle negative comments left on your blog?

I moderate all comments on my blogs. I didn't always do this, but over the last couple of years, the science fiction community has been plagued by a group calling themselves variously "Sad Puppies" and "Rabid Puppies". If you are familiar with "GamerGate", then just imagine if that sort of gang of racist, sexist, homophobic dullards were vaguely interested in science fiction and fantasy literature, and decided to turn their hate spewing on to pretty much everyone else in that particular fandom.

The Puppies have spent much of their time trying to manipulate the Hugo Awards, with the whole story being long and somewhat convoluted. The salient point here is that many of the various Pups took it upon themselves to spread vitriol among those fans who were not aligned with their particular brand of douchebaggery, and a few popped up in the comments here. I always made it a policy to delete comments that I considered to be beyond the pale in terms of civility (and sometimes would delete comments that were simply incoherent or inane), but that would sometimes take a few hours, or even days if I was away from my computer for a while. During the recent unpleasantness, I changed to having all comments go through moderation first and I have basically adopted a policy of simply deleting any particularly nasty or negative comments before they even see the light of day.

The policy here is simply this: My space, my rules. I may or may not allow a comment to be posted, depending on whether I think it adds something useful, interesting, insightful, or even just innocuous to the conversation. Anyone who doesn't like that, can go and post whatever they want on their own space.

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4 comments:

  1. Sorry you have been having problems with commenting.

    I don't use comment moderation but most likely would if I kept receiving negative or inappropriate comments.

    Thanks for the information, and have a great Sunday.

    Happy Hopping!!

    Elizabeth
    Silver's Reviews
    My Blog Hop Answer

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    1. @Elizabeth: I don't have any problems with commenting since I started using comment moderation. It frustrates the trolls into going away when they realize that their comments will never even see the light of day.

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  2. Wowser! That's unbelievable! I was totally unaware of any of this. This is why so many fandom groups on Facebook are closed groups. You get some rabid fanatics with a chip on their shoulder and there is no way to civilly converse with them. If I started getting those, I would moderate my comments, too.

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    Replies
    1. @La La in the Library: I'm not surprised. The Hugo awards are the most prestigious award in science fiction and fantasy, but the people who administer and vote on them are a much smaller subset of the science fiction community, so this sort of political drama isn't all that visible across the broad spectrum of readers and fans.

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