The village has spoken
Bookworm on Aug 14 2011 at 4:55 pm | Filed under: Blogs and Blogging
My post about banning Zachriel garnered over 61 comments, all very thoughtful, including Zachriel’s own defense. After a great deal of rather painful internal debate, I’ve decided to ban Zachriel. Indigo Red, discussing a Zachriel-type commenter named Mudkitty, best sums up my thoughts on the subject:
Some of my best posts and best comments involved Mudkitty and I always had high visitor counts as long as she was around, but the problems she created were eventually far greater than the challenging arguments. No matter the post subject, the comment thread quickly focused upon her, her Liberal views, and her autodidactic knowledge which was almost invariably and demonstrably wrong. She would question the ideas of my readers, but would never answer challenges to her own positions, constantly making the wildest claims that I and others felt compelled to rebut and always taking up far more time and energy than the ordeal was worth. In the end, she would answer with another inanity or nothing at all. In essence, Mudkitty hijacked my “intellectual living room” creating a great deal of strife and animosity that caused, as you’ve noted, some readers and frequent commenters to simply go away never to return. To save my blog and sanity, I banned Mudkitty, the one and only time I’ve banned anyone.
I can’t put it better than that. Despite an invariably placid tone and polite mien, Zachriel is nevertheless creating a hostile environment. The best analogy I can think of is to a sit-down striker: he’s not committing any act of violence, but he’s nevertheless preventing things from getting done.
Banning Zachriel does not mean that I want to create an echo chamber in which everyone merely applauds what I have to say (although applause is always nice). It does mean, though, that people cannot simply churn out facts. Comments must have a beginning, a middle and an end, with a discernible narrative.
Also, I’m henceforth going to delete spam-like comments, which I define as someone leaving three or more comments, written within minutes of each other, on a single post. This is simply too burdensome for people, since it clutters people’s emails and stifles dialog. I won’t be banning the commenter, I’ll just be slowing the flow.
Related posts:
- Should we exile someone from the village?
- Continuing the discussion about left versus right
- “If you prick me, do I not leak?”
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24 Responses to “The village has spoken”
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people are still complaining about that given the normal modern remedies of RSS here?
Thanks for letting us know your thinking, Book. I agree that Indigo Red summed it up best.
Nobody here has a problem with contrary thinkers or dissenters, so the irony is that the Zachs had it within their power to continue commenting in htis room but simply ignored the ever growing number of warnings that their approach was not working. Watching the sometimes agonizing back and forth that people here have experienced trying to decide yes or no to banning them, you can see that the Zachs could have saved themselves if they made some small concessions to the temper of the salon.
But they didn’t. Not a single attempt to address the concerns here, which were always thrown back at us as examples of ad hominems, or echo chamberism, or being off-topic, or reactionary, etc. When it is always your fault in a (non) relationship, you tend to discontinue giving the other party the benefit of the doubt.
As Ymarsakar would say, “C’est la vie.”
For those that think this is going to interfere with me, understand this.
It won’t. Heh
Anyone who subscribes to anything, gets so many emails that they had better get a filter. I know because I subscribe to several newsletters. I dare say more comments are written here than any newsletter can send in a week.
And Z has also made sure that if anyone liked email feeds before, that they would unsubscribe. Just to avoid him. Well, finding alternatives due to that excuse can only be good.
1. Turn your email subscription to Bookworm Room comments to OFF
2. Get an RSS feeder and plug in Bookworm Room’s comment RSS feed url
3. Turn on RSS feed program or Google Reader, and read the comments you want to read.
Sure you can eliminate someone’s writings from 4 posts to 2 comments, but given that there are 25+ comments written per day, not sure why that space saved in your email box saved you much time at all.
Unless you’re specifically ignoring one person’s name and you want to not read that person’s name, so when that person’s comment pops up multiple times, it ignores you.
Heh, well, that’s not hard to get, now is it.
Thank you, Book. As the blog owner, it is up to you, not us. I appreciate you pondering our comments on this issue and finding them worthy of contemplation. I was glad to leave it up to you, however.
I will now paraphrase Martin Luther King in a manner that is perhaps unworthy but expresses my happiness nonetheless. Raise the wine glass and cheer!
“Free Of Zach! Free Of Zach! Thank God Almighty, We Are Free Of Zach!”
personally, i’m worried. My vote wasn’t counted, because I didn’t vote. So I’m worried we’ll get a recount by Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi and they will override the local decision.
Ymarsakar, I stand ready with 30,000 crack, battle-hardened Franks (not French) to ride overnight to Gore and Pelosi’s mansions to overturn their overrides.
Mart, they must have finally heard that somebody was going to take their cheetos and popcorn away from them.
Btw, when you’re at it, try to find their investment statements and portfolio information on hard drives and hard copies. Be useful intel if we could get it.
Seems like a tough choice to make, but the right one never the less to ban Z.
Ymarsakar: RSS feeds are not for everyone. I happen to find them a very irritating way to aggregate data. Now that I understand how you are receiving data, the rhythm of your comments makes more sense. If you’re responding to comments as they come in on your RSS feed, fine. However, if you just keep adding “one more thing” to your last comment, resulting in four or five comments in a row, please don’t. It makes the data flow too overwhelming for me and, I suspect, for others as well.
Book, that’s fine as it is. Although I always hope that people will eventually start using the better data collection tools.
Blogs weren’t for everyone and many women found it too intimidation (before the age of universal perma bans). Ebooks weren’t for everyone. Then portable ebook readers weren’t for everyone.
Eventually the pressure becomes too ubiquitous, and too useful, for people to do without.
I don’t read the aggregated data off RSS. I use it to notify me when something is worth taking a look at. I then go here and write comments.
The way I process information isn’t the fault of RSS feeds. I’ve always been like this. I process information in a non-linear format. I’m thinking about 3-5 things at a time.
I used to write on a notepad and then just paste every response to every comment on a thread, at once, but that became too troublesome with this commenting system. This comment system does not accept pastes well. The formating doesn’t transfer over.
I still want a html editor version, like wordpress has, where I can paste in html and it’ll parse it and post it.
It takes a village to vanquish an irritant.
Jeepers Wally..I will sure miss “Z”.. Don’t worry Beaver Mom knows what she is doing.
I haven’t been a frequent reader (or commenter) of late. However, my memory of the late (to this site) Zach was that he was extremely persistent, invariably disruptive, and always annoying.
BW, you do the work here and should control the direction this “salon” takes. Dissenting voices improve the conversation, unless they are constantly shouting. At that point they prevent discussion because everyone is inclined to shout back (either literally or figuratively)
I have noticed that conservative blogs agonize over banning the most egregious trolls. Progressive blogs harass even the most polite dissenting voices. Sounds a little like the MSM.
I suspect, for others as well.
In a thread with 64 comments and 115 comments, what’s the difference of 10 or 15 more?
If a person didn’t get inundated and data maxed out at comment 50 in a thread, that is going into a box in their email, what’s with the next 5 comments in the chain?
That may be true for many people, Ymarsakar, but it’s not true for me — and it’s time I shape the dialog a little more closely to my preferences.
In the words of Nat King Cole …
Straighten up and fly right
Straighten up and stay right
Straighten up and fly right
Cool down bubba don’t you blow your top
Been out of town for awhile and missed the big event as my internet access was limited. I did stop by Professor Jacobson’s excellent Legal Insurrection blog the other day, and sure enough there were the Zach(s).
Like fleas or ticks they jump from one host to the next with unequaled agility.
“Like fleas or ticks they jump from one host to the next with unequaled agility.”
And with about the same level of self-awareness.
Oldflyer said:
> I did stop by Professor Jacobson’s excellent Legal Insurrection blog the other day, and sure enough there were the Zach(s). Like fleas or ticks they jump from one host to the next with unequaled agility.
Poor Zach. So *many* ill-informed, wrong-headed conservative blogs requiring “correction”, and so *little* time!
Good God. Good riddance!
OldFlyer, Da Hammah, and Mike Devx have just made some statements showing some wit and humor. The Z-Team was rather lacking in the humor department- or should I say “humour.” When a series of witty comments inundated a thread, the Z-Team was conspicuous by its absence.
The only time I recall any “humor” from the Z-Team was when I brought up the meaning of “teabagger” epithet, which the Z-Team had used on the Zachriel blog. Z-Team’s response: “giggle.” Yeah, that ‘s a real giggle.
Hammah, I’m sure you will respond by saying, ” You will please address me by my proper blog name: Charles Martel.”
It’s like a mutating plague. Get rid of it in one place, and it pops up in another.
Gringo, are you kidding? I like the way “Da Hammah” rolls around in my mouth. I’ve already walked the neighborhood and told every dog I met that from now on they will be lunging and snarling at “Da Hammah.”