Since it seems to be in the air, I thought I'd formally articulate my relatively fast-and-loose comment policy. These are fluid standards, not hard and fast rules, for those who care about Rule of Law jargon.
1. Comment spam gets deleted. That hardly even bears mentioning.
2. Comments on recent posts are allowed by default. If I read a comment and find it hateful, offensive, counter-productive, spiteful, or otherwise useless I will probably delete it. If you find your comments getting deleted multiple times, you may be on the road to having your IP banned from commenting.
3. Where others have commented on a comment otherwise bound for deletion, disemvowelling is preferred. This preserves the meaning of the original comment and its derivative comments for those who wish to decipher ir. For those who don't, it can be taken as a signpost reading "Here there be trollage!"
4. Everyone makes mistakes. If you put a comment up, whether trollish or not, that you subsequently find embarrasing feel free to contact me about it. I'll have to weigh how deleting the comment would fit in with the what remains of the conversation, but chances are I'll remove it.
5. Similarly, I reserve the right to delete my own comments and posts wholesale. Generally this means switching a post to draft status, meaning the conversation is preserved but no longer public. If circumstances change and cause me to think better of a post's removal, I may bring it back.
6. When posts get old, the commenting burden shifts. This blog is configured to automatically put any comment on a post greater than two weeks old into moderation, since spambots tend to hit older posts. However, since new comments show up on my sidebar, a comment on an old thread will draw that old post to the fore again. Thus: At the two-weeks-old mark, the burden shifts. For posts younger than two weeks, the default is that comments will be accepted and only extraordinarily bad comments will be deleted. After two weeks the default is that a comment will be deleted unless it compellingly adds to the post in a manner that causes me to want to open that discussion again. So don't feel offended that, for instance, I don't want to discuss abortion on Gilmore Girls or words that end in "-trix" anymore.
That should be everything. As always, I reserve the right to bend any of the rules as necessity requires and to amend these rules on a whim.
