Strange Conversations: Part Forty-Nine

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Catriona wrote at Sep 25, 09:47 pm

I’m thinking I have to memorise Tim’s rant from Spaced, when he’s sacked for shouting at that young boy who wants to buy a Jar-Jar Binks doll: “You are so blind! You so do not understand! You weren’t there at the beginning. You don’t know how good it was! How important! This is it for you! This jumped-up firework display of a toy advert! People like you make me sick! What’s wrong with you?”

Admittedly, I’m not old enough to have seen Star Wars (I will not call it A New Hope: that’s a stupid name for a film) at the cinema, but these days I figure anyone who grew to love the films before Phantom Menace was there at the beginning.

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Catriona wrote at Sep 25, 11:33 pm

Tim, you have the soul of an editor. Which is convenient. Now I’m going to have to go back and edit my original post.

(Still, once I edit it, we’ll be left with the world’s most random blog comment, so that’s something.)

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Catriona wrote at Sep 26, 12:17 am

Initially, that’s what I thought, as well—which is why it took me a good five minutes to spot my typo.

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Catriona wrote at Sep 26, 01:04 am

I have the option to post comments on the site, to hide them as unmoderated, to hide them as spam, to ban the comment author, or to delete them, in addition to editing them.

I’ve deleted comments by request, when the comment author didn’t realise that his computer had auto-completed his user name to include his entire e-mail address.

I’ve banned comment authors when they were attempting to spam the site, but only a couple of times; what seem to be spammers hit two old posts, in particular, some thirty or forty times a day, but rarely do the spam attacks make it to the comments threads.

I’ve only ever edited that one comment (from other authors; I’ve edited my own a couple of times, when I’ve noticed errors). I don’t like the idea of censoring or correcting other people’s comments silently (though I’m happy to draw attention to something that I think needs clarifying). I can’t think of many instances in which I’d be inclined to edit a comment (anything inappropriate or abusive I’d simply not moderate) and I would never do so without drawing attention to the fact that I had done so.

Nick is also a site moderator, but he doesn’t exercise his power, because moderating my blog comments is one of the great joys of my life.