Frequent commenters on this blog will have noticed that I turned on the "moderate comments" feature this morning. I did this because an Internet troll who calls himself Harry Poole was leaving a bunch of troll'ish comments after I wrote a blog post about the weird questions he asked me in an email.
So rather than leave them up for a while and then delete them, I decided to publish comments manually instead of automatically.
That's no big deal for me. But it inconveniences other commenters who are used to seeing their comments published immediately (unless my blogging service wrongly sends the comment to a spam folder, which I try to check several times a day).
This is my plan for dealing with Harry, which I'm asking for the help of regular commenters with. Tomorrow morning I'll go back to automatic publishing of comments, though I might turn that feature on at certain times. I'll delete any troll comments from Harry as soon as I notice them.
(Harry is welcome to leave non-troll comments. They won't be deleted if Harry decides to act like a normal commenter. Meaning, Harry doesn't insult me or other commenters; Harry discusses ideas in a reasonable fashion; Harry complies with this blog's comment guidelines.)
In those guidelines I note that trolls thrive on attention, so the best way to deal with them is to ignore them. Thus I'm requesting that visitors to this blog ignore any troll'ish comments left by Harry or a pseudonym that they come across before I delete them. If someone mentions Harry in a comment that's a response to one of Harry's trolling comments, I'll delete that response also.
It's unfortunate that people like Harry exist on the Internet, because they make cyberspace life worse for everybody. We all know what's it like to be in a group where some jerk tries to dominate the conversation, insults others in the group, and refuses to engage in reasonable discussions. They have to be removed from a real-life group, and they also have to be dealt with in Internet sites like this blog.
Oh, so that's what that was about, is it? I thought I might have clicked Refresh by mistake instead of clicking Post. Been a while since moderated comments, forgot what that was like.
Absolutely, will do, about ignoring him. (Would probably have done just that, in any case.)
Haha, he's clearly tasted blood, with that email of his drawing so much response, and now keeps compulsively returning for more.
Tragedy is, Harry, if you're reading this, since you're investing this time here in any case, you might attempt some coherent and honest discussion here with Brian and the rest of us. You might learn something then, from your time spent here.
But kooks don't do that. They're out to preach, never to learn. Stop being a kook, Harry. It's not cool. Happy to welcome you here if you decide to shift to non-kook mode.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | April 11, 2023 at 07:20 PM
Supporting the efforts to prevent your blog from being harried by the Harryrator.
Posted by: El | May 25, 2023 at 10:22 AM