Filed Under: comments

Official Commenting Etiquette for PastaQueen.com

January 31, 2010 at 8:26 am

I’ve been meaning to write up some rules of etiquette for the comments section of this blog, so here they are! This post is not aimed at anyone in particular (except for the parts that are). As with any rules of etiquette, these guidelines are designed to let everyone know what is considered appropriate behavior. Once everyone knows what is expected of them, we can all relax and enjoy a better interactive experience because we know what the rules are.

The rules are not intended to overwhelm you or frighten you into silence. I generally enjoy reading the comments, and I wish more of the lurkers would feel comfortable enough to stop lurking and start commenting. If you are a first-time commenter, don’t worry, I won’t decapitate you for making an error. However, if you start to comment on a regular basis, I will expect you to adhere to these rules.

So here they are, the Official Commenting Etiquette for PastaQueen.com! They’ll probably make me sound like I have a bug up my ass, but I was just at the health fair and I swear my colon is clean.

1) Do not make personal attacks.
Please to not make personal attacks on me or on other commenters. Think of the blog as a party happening in my living room. If you would not say something to me or my guests in my living room, do not say it on the blog. Polite disagreement is fine. Slamming someone’s face into the guacamole dip is not.

2) Please stay on topic.
Please only leave comments that are relevant to the conversation. It is ok for the conversation to steer onto a tangent as long as it happens during the natural flow of conversation. However, if a comment has nothing to do with the original post or with another comment, it doesn’t belong on that post. If you leave several comments on a post and do not seem to be getting a response from other readers, you should consider whether your comments are appropriate to that post. (That means you, Jere.)

3) Do not leave spam or ads that are masquerading as comments
I am not an idiot. When you leave a comment that is simply meant to increase your site’s PageRank, I can tell. It will not be approved. You are wasting your time. Please go away.

If you are a spammer, I suggest you consider a career change. There are many fine jobs available on Monster.com and CareerBuilder. If you want to place an ad, you may do so at reasonable rates.

4) If your comment is longer than 500 words, it should be a blog post on your own site.
While I’m happy that some of the discussions on my site elicit deep thought and analytical thinking, the comments section is meant to be a place of discussion, not speechmaking. If your comment is longer than 500 words, it deserves to be a post on your own blog. That way your post can be the focal point of the comments section of your own blog instead of derailing the discussion here so it becomes about your comment instead of about the original post. You can start a blog quickly and easily at Blogger.com or WordPress.com. Once you’ve posted your entry, you may link to it in the comments section if it is directly relevant to the post you’re commenting on.

5) Unless a link is directly relevant to the discussion, do not link to it.
If you have a web link that is directly relevant to the discussion, it is ok to post it even if it’s a link to your own site. However, it is not ok to leave a link to your site in your comment without reason. This qualifies as an ad, and if you wish to advertise on my site you may do so at reasonable rates here. There is a text field in the comments form where you can leave your site link. If readers of my blog find your comment interesting enough, they will click on that link on their own. Adding your link at the bottom of your post for no other reason than self-promotion is considered to be rude.

6) Do not leave your name in the body of your comment.
There is a field in the comment form to enter your name. Leaving your name in the body of your post is superfluous. I know some people do this because they consider it polite to sign their post. In some arenas, that is proper etiquette, but on this blog it is considered to be a social gaffe. Please restrain yourself from doing this.

7) Please read at least the first 5-10 comments.
Some of my entries elicit a lot of comments, and I do not expect my readers to read every single one before commenting. However, please read at least the first 5-10 comments, or at least skim some of them. I can tell when you haven’t done this because 10 or more of you will leave the exact same advice on a post, acting as if you are the first one to do so. This makes the conversation repetitive, and less like a conversation and more like a lot of people talking at once without listening to each other.

8) Please read the entire entry before leaving a comment.
Sometimes people read something in a post and are so filled with the need to share that they leave a comment before reading the entire post. This might work out ok sometimes, but other times it makes you look silly because you ask something or point out something that is already addressed in the latter part of the post. For your own sake, read the whole post before commenting.

9) Comments may be edited or deleted at my discretion
This is not a democracy. It is a totalitarian regime ruled by PastaQueen and defended by the macaroni military. I may edit or delete your comments at whim. I will be happy to deport you if necessary. Don’t make me whack you with my scepter!

10) Don’t make an ass of yourself.
This is more of a recommendation than an actual rule. I used to remove comments from people who were exceptionally rude or cruel, but lately I have simply allowed them to be posted. Then I let the community decide if and how to reprimand the individuals for their inappropriate behavior. If you want to be a jerk, I am not going to protect you from yourself.

So there they are, the official commenting rules. I reserve the right to update these and add additional rules as it becomes necessary (translation: as people find new ways to annoy me). These rules are meant to make the interactive experience more enjoyable by setting clear boundaries on appropriate behavior. As I said before, they are not intended to overwhelm or frighten you. I hope you’ll join us in the conversation! And thanks for following Rule #8!

Please do not put you name or url in the body of your comments

January 6, 2009 at 8:13 pm

Oh. My. God.

Please do not put your name or URL in the body of your comments.

I did not make this policy clear until a week ago. Those of you who did this before then, I forgive. You did not know any better.

I recently put this policy in bold in the comment disclaimer at the bottom of every page, right below the “Submit” button. Yet, people still left their names and URLs in the body of comments. I privately emailed them and asked them to stop doing this. They apologized and I forgave them.

Tonight, I added another disclaimer, right above the body section of the comment, just in case people didn’t scroll down all the way to see the other disclaimer. And yet again, someone just left their name in the body of the comment.

So now, I am writing this post, and I am asking you, for the love of all that is holy or unholy in this universe, DO NOT PUT YOUR NAME OR URL IN THE BODY OF YOUR COMMENTS. There are fields for that data. Putting them in the body is redundant. It pisses me off. It makes me want to murder you and everyone you have ever loved, including that boy you kissed in elementary school.

And I know, as I write this, that many of you will be mumbling to yourselves, “Wow, PastaQueen has finally lost her shit, hasn’t she?” Yes, yes I have. If you haven’t been able to read between the lines of this blog, my life has been a miserable ball of crap recently. I am hanging on by a thread. And when you blatantly disregard a reasonable request that I have made easy for you to read, I am about THIS close to finally snapping and running through the streets in my pajamas screaming.

So, please do not be the person who finally pushes my schoolbus over the edge of a cliff. Leave that to the unfortunate asshole who cuts me off in traffic tomorrow. And before anyone asks, yes, I am seeking professional help and yes, I am on medication. I am doing my best to get by right now, but you are NOT helping me when you sign your name and URL in the comments. I know this is a stupid, stupid, stupid thing get angry over and the rage it has induced in me is a sign of my own current mental instability, but please, PLEASE, PLEASE, do NOT sign your name or URL in the comments. And please, do not even sign your name or URL in the comments on this entry as a joke. I bill ban you and that will be it.

Thank you and good night. I will tell my psychologist you say hello.

It will be interesting to see the comments on my entry about comments

December 8, 2008 at 8:54 am

It was interesting to observe the reaction to two of my entries last week. First, I announced that I was sending my cat Officer Krupke to live with my mother because he could not get along with the new and more lovable kitten, Java Bean. Most everyone was supportive of the decision and related similar experiences. Then the next day I announced that I’d changed my mind and couldn’t bare to part with the furry curmudgeon. Most everyone was supportive of the decision and related similar experiences.

What the hell is wrong with you people?

It appears that people were much more willing to comment on a post when they agreed with the situation. Otherwise, they tended to keep their mouths shut. This only seems polite since the post was about a personal matter. If we were discussing politics or the economy or something where a person and a cat’s feelings weren’t involved, I think people would be more likely to voice a dissenting opinion. You all certainly had a lot to say about natural sweeteners last month. In real life, I am only kindly critical of people I know very well and whom I know will take any advice as coming from a place of true concern. I know when I read personal blogs, I’m unlikely to criticize a personal decision of the blogger because I don’t want to get on their bad side and I find it unlikely a stranger on the Internet will sway their opinion.

I do sometimes worry if blogging encourages an echo chamber, if blogs are only welcoming of people who agree with and support a blogger and make the environment uncomfortable for people who disagree. I don’t want to only hear from people who are like me and think like me. Some of the most interesting discussions on this blog have come when people disagree with what I’ve said and start an intelligent and polite conversation about it. As long as people aren’t nasty or rude, I’m usually ok with dissent. That’s why my commenting policy says “lively discussion is encouraged.” It’s also why I say I’ll delete you if you start talking smack. But, there are also some topics where I am not interested in hearing what other people think. The decisions in my personal life are not up for a vote.

The blogger certainly sets the tone for the conversations that will appear on their blog. I’m not sure how I would have reacted to kind comments encouraging me to keep Krupke when I was intent on giving him away. I’m not sure how I would have reacted to polite comments urging me to send him to Gramma’s when I’d decided to keep him. But it’s interesting that no one seemed to do either. I also have to wonder if I wanted people to agree with me when I was ditching my cat, and similarly wanted people to agree with me when I decided to keep him. When other people say my decision is right, it makes me feel better. It makes me feel more likely that what I am doing is right. But if people only feel comfortable commenting when they agree, I’m just fooling myself, picking out the comments I want to hear to reinforce the idea I already have.

When I first started getting comments on my blog, it was an awesome high. Hearing people say they liked my writing made me literally smile. I’d bounce around in my seat. It made me feel like I might actually be good at this writing thing. When people said, “Hell, yeah!” or said what I’d written really resonated with them, it was better than what I imagine heroin must be like. When someone said something cruel, it hurt me more than I would ever admit and stayed in my thoughts longer than I liked.

But lately I find myself not caring as much what other people think, good or bad. Sometimes I write an entry and wonder if it’s really necessary for me to read the comments. Sometimes I write something because it makes me feel good all on its own, because it helps me think things through, and I don’t feel the need for anyone else to agree or back me up or tell me that yes I am right and yes that was good. I feel more secure and strong in myself. I know who I am, for the most part.

Sometimes I write an entry just for me, not my audience, and I think about turning the comments off. Sometimes I’d like to blog about my headache and not have someone ask if I’ve tried eliminating artificial sweeteners from my diet. But I know if I turn off comments it would only draw attention to the fact that I’ve done it and cause people to email me asking why I did it. I know some of the old-school bloggers didn’t even have comments on their blogs, which they called “online journals.” But I also know blogging is a conversation, and that’s part of the appeal of the medium, that we can talk back and forth and share ideas. Shutting down the conversation is an aggressive and noticeable move. However, even when comments are on, I’m acting as the moderator and can sway the conversation one way or the other by commenting in the thread. I cannot control the conversation, but I can usually steer it where I want it to go.

I have no grand conclusions here. All I know is that a blog is made by us all, though I have more power over my own domain than anyone else. This is my turf and I get to win here. Period. But I hope people aren’t just writing things they know will please me. I like to examine the uncomfortable truths of life, and I can’t always do that myself. All I ask is that you be polite and kindly and speak your own truth.

Defensive blogging – I’m not clairvoyant but I try to be

August 22, 2008 at 7:43 am

I cannot read your mind, but I try to. When I write blog entries I try to anticipate how my readers will react. I try to avoid writing words that will unintentionally piss people off. I try to counter-argue objections in advance. I try to avoid analogies that might swerve the conversation off topic. I think about the unexpected ways people reacted to entries in the past so I can avoid mistakes in the future.

I call it defensive blogging.

Still, I’m a long way from putting a sign on this blog saying, “Readings from PastaQueen, certified psychic.” Sometimes I post entries about vulnerable issues and I’m scared to check my email because I don’t know whether I’ll get a “Hell, yeah!” or a “Yeah, you’re going to hell.” Sometimes I read an old post and wonder why the hell I didn’t anticipate the ways people reacted. Here are some of the ways I try to blog defensively, and some of the reasons I’ve failed to block a punch.

Missing landmines because I focus on the whole field

Yesterday, I talked about setting three big goals a year, but I kept my third goal private because it’s personal. My brain must be flying on only one of two engines, because it didn’t occur to me that keeping my third goal a secret would drive people crazy. It was like saying, “Don’t look in this box.” Now everyone wants to know what’s in the freakin’ box. I wasn’t trying to be a tease; I just have to keep certain areas of my life private. I will say, it has nothing to do with finding a PastaKing. And even if it did, that would fall under the greater umbrella of goal #2, “Meeting new people.”

I was so focused on expressing my greater idea in the entry as a whole that I didn’t stop to think, “Hey, what if people want to know what goal #3 is?” Lately, I’ve been worried about my spelling because last week I got 3 e-mails pointing out 3 different typos. I don’t have an editor, people! Spellchecker doesn’t catch everything! That’s the problem with defensive blogging, you never know what you’ll have to defend yourself against. You can build a great moat only to be attacked by flying monkeys.

Anticipating objections

In my state fair entry, I joked that the carnies might deep-fry rats after hours. Originally I wrote that they might deep-fry cats after hours, but changed it because I didn’t want to get a comment from a crazy cat lady saying, “I can’t believe you would joke about deep-frying felines! I’m going to call the humane society on you!” I myself am a cat person, and I get queasy when my cat even pokes his head into the open microwave door. So, I changed “cat” to “rat” since I figured the rat-loving contingent of my audience was far smaller than the kitty lovers. Attack successfully avoided – unless the rat king is reading this.

Overlooking emotionally sensitive issues

When I was going on TV in May, I said that I hoped I wouldn’t get bumped for a terrorist attack that day, mentioning the Brooklyn Bridge specifically. Some people thought I was joking, but I was being serious. You never know what could happen. Some of my readers in New York found this emotionally jarring because they’d lived through the 9/11 attacks. I live in Indiana and I don’t personally know anyone who was harmed in those attacks, so that statement didn’t have as much of an emotional effect on me as it did on those who were there. I didn’t anticipate how much that flippant comment would upset some people. Otherwise, I would have made an analogy that was farther out there, like “I hope I don’t get bumped by Martians invading Manhattan.” No one has emotional sensitivity to Martians, right? Anyone? Do I have any Martian readers that I just pissed off? Marvin?

Using an example or analogy that steers things off course

In another entry, I was talking about the need to avoid unnecessary negative feedback from your environment. But instead of talking about that, the conversation got steered off course because I’d mentioned a specific incident with a specific commenter. Then, everyone went into my archives and tried to find the comment that I was talking about. Then no one was talking about surrounding yourself with positive influences, they were talking about who said what a week ago. Aaaagh! Now I try not to use analogies or examples that might distract from my main point. Except, of course, I just did because you are probably going to dig through my archives looking for that entry. (And no, I won’t link to the damn conversation. Find it yourself if you care so much.) I also forgot that the commenter was probably still reading my blog, so she got pissed off too, which was ok with me but something I’d failed to anticipate.

Just being wrong

I know you all will be devastated to hear this, but I’m not perfect. Sometimes I say something that is incorrect. For instance, I wrote about eating a passion fruit several weeks after I’d eaten the fruit, saying “I bit into it.” Then people started commenting telling me I should never bite into a passion fruit because its skin is hard. That’s when I remembered I had tried biting into it, and then realized I needed to cut it open. Only, I didn’t take any notes after eating the stupid thing, so I forgot to mention that. Instead of focusing on the entry, people started asking me what kind of dope I was for not being able to eat correctly.

Misunderstandings

Other times, I have simply been unclear in my writing and people have misunderstood what I was trying to say. These incidents are annoying because people think I’ve said something I wasn’t trying to say. It usually happens when I’ve thrown together a blog entry in 15 minutes before running off to work.

Still, I try

I’m sure I will post entries in the future that will not get the reactions I think they will. But I try to keep the bizarre and unexpected fallout to a minimum. I also try not to let defensive blogging lead to self-censorship. I doubt I can please everyone, nor do I think I should. Some people are assholes, and if they like me it reflects poorly on my character. I’m not against saying something controversial or stating my opinions if I believe in what I’m saying, but I don’t like to stir up shit for no reason.

I don’t like it when reactions to my entries head in weird or unnecessary directions, but I know I can’t control the conversations either. I also have to accept that I cannot place myself in the perspective of every single person who might ever stumble across my blog. I can’t anticipate how every person will react, and if I could there would be no point in having comments anyway. Comments let me hear other people’s perspectives, widening my worldview. Still, I try to blog smarter and better. Defensive blogging is part of that.

Now, give me a second to put on my helmet and insert my mouth guard and the commenting can begin.

Filed Under: comments

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