My mighty fist o’ censorship

If I have something real to say on this site – more than the typical how my weekend went sort of thing – I’m more than willing to have complete strangers drop by and offer an opinion. Hell, even if all I’m doing is talking about my mundane existence, I really don’t care if some unknown person wants to offer a suggestion or two. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here on the Internet.

When you play around on a site as small as mine you come to cherish those random passerbys who comment. There’s a feeling of “Wow, somebody noticed me out of millions.” I know most of it is completely random, you just happened to hit the right search terms or click on the wrong link, but it’s still a little ego boost.

However, I really don’t understand people who can’t put down much of a coherent thought when commenting and why they bother cluttering sites with garbage. Back in January someone started hitting an old post of mine (from the summer of 2003), attacking me for my professed dislike of Macs. He was very adamant, but I trounced him from all sides. Although a tad irritating, it was an exchange of real words and complete sentences (for the most part). On the other hand, a post I wrote last summer on (ironically) censorship has occasionally garnered some bizarre attention. While I initially let it all fly, I am now starting to agree with some of the other bloggers out there – if it doesn’t contribute to the site, screw it.

I’m not saying that people have to make strong points in their comments. It doesn’t matter if all you have to say is “That makes sense” or “I still disagree” – as long as you try to offer a coherent though, that’s cool. But no more of this random garbage, dropping the f-bomb left and right, boredom crap. Quote lyrics on your own damn site.

In other words, I’m axing some old comments and will soon be enabling plugins to automatically close comments after something like 30 days. It’s not like there’s so much traffic on this site that I need to leave those discussion open, anyway.