Rui CarmoIn general, I find site comments rather unsatisfactory as an interaction mechanism, so I encourage people to consider writing something on their own site and linking back to mine or e-mailing me directly.
Which is why, over the years, I’ve come to invest less and less time into them, first outsourcing them to external services, and finally (on March 2011) removing them altogether.
Nevertheless, I used to have a comment policy, which I reproduce here for archival purposes:
- Comments were only allowed in some sections of the site (usually blog entries). Id occasionally enabled them in other pages on a per-page basis, at my discretion.
- The site comments were based on the Disqus service, and as such were not an integral part of this site (i.e., if they don’t work, I couldn’t do much about it, but they also saved me time and CPU power).
- Comment moderation was not usually switched on, but I switched it on temporarily to deal with uncivilized behavior.
- Comments were automatically disabled 15 to 30 days after a Wiki node was last modified (depending on the node itself and where it is on the namespace, but the time limit was clearly visible). This was to avoid the usual amount of “hey, but you can do that now” comments one or two years after a post was written (people definitely don’t know how to read post dates, even when they’re embedded in the URLs).
- I reserved the right to remove any comment that I found offensive, off-topic, outdated or just plain misguided, as well as banning repeated offenders and spammers.
- If you were tied to any application or program I mention, you were asked to please make it very clear when you commented regarding them. Feedback is great, but anything that even hinted at an attempt to hype your own stuff was removed. It’s nothing personal–I just don’t like my site being used by other people (however friendly) as an advertising vehicle.
- All of the above could be changed at any time at my personal discretion. This is my personal site, not your playground.