Since the big kerFFRFle began, there have been a lot of new people posting and, I think, some new readers. You are all welcome, of course, but I’d like to remind newbies of the commenting rules, otherwise known as “Da Roolz” in Chicago argot. You can find these rules on the left sidebar or click here. If you are new or haven’t read them in a while, please do so. I’d like to emphasize three of them:
- Do not insult your host. Pretend that you’re speaking to me in my living room which is, in a sense, what this website is.
- Most important, please try to refrain from insulting other posters, no matter how misguided you think they are. I don’t like name-calling, for it lessens whatever class this site has and certainly doesn’t foster discussion. I will often warn people about this behavior either on the site, or in a private email. About 70% of those who are warned respond with truculence, either insulting me or saying that their behavior is fully justified. That’s a good way to get blacklisted—almost as good as telling me to stop posting on cats or cowboy boots. If I ask you to apologize to a commenter whom you insulted, please do so.
- Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.
The last comment deserves special emphasis, as there are many people who seem to want to address everyone’s comments in a thread, or who otherwise don’t care about posting 25% of the time or more. Don’t be a comment hog! You can have your say, too, but don’t keep having it over and over again.
As always, civility rules, and so be polite to everyone, even those whose comments you don’t like.
Thanks!
PCC(E)
Since you brought it up, are cats IN cowboy boots ok?
Definition of “thread,” Ceiling Cat? Do you mean that a person’s number of comments shouldn’t exceed 10% of all comments on a given article/post of yours? That is, are you using “thread” synonymously with article/post? Or do you mean “thread” as in original comments under a post of yours. For instance, there might be 30 initial comments under a post of yours, and other users may engage each as “threads.” So, there could be 30 threads.
What I’ve been going on is looking at the metrics for the article/post where it tells us how many total comments have been made. If there are 70 comments, for instance, I limit mine to seven. But I don’t want to be doing this incorrectly, which is why I’m asking.
I was a bit concerned last night when commenting on one of your posts. It has 87 total comments, five of which are from me. (At the time I was posting, there were only 70ish.) So, I was within the limit if counting by proportion of my comments to all. However, it does look garish to me that I wrote so much under the first comment of mine. I was torn about this. I wasn’t arguing with anyone, just responding and working out thoughts. It is a lot of fun to engage here because of the fantastic content and bright comments from other readers. On more than one occasion doing has functioned as pre-writing that I’ve later used for other purposes. Guessing I’m not alone on that.
But I don’t want to be a comment hog. So, if the definition is 10% within a user-started thread under an article of yours (vs 10% of total comments), I will keep that in mind.
I have a set of serious questions. Is ‘Mr. Coyne’ acceptable? Is ‘PCC(E)’ acceptable? Which is preferred?
My method of operating is directly attacked by #3. It also seems to be an algorithm that Youtube uses to censor comments. This is a temperamental variation as I will not comment at all for many, many posts, but will comment a lot on particular posts as a bunch of other commenters bring up a bunch of points I think have counter-proposals that they have not been exposed to, but in a singular manner (one or two per commenter).
Temperamentally I’m also not one to make a blog to address all of these points separately. I’m not socially inclined, so cannot muster up the effort (and would be massively repulsed from interacting, or even reading the comments, if any of my blog posts ever blew up). And even if I did the points I’m trying to make would be out of context and would not reach the individuals I’m responding to.
So basically I’m just asking for some judicious leeway here.
Thanks for da roolz, Jerry. They keep this place a sane respite on the internet.