My Gatekeeper
Meet Adam, my new gatekeeper. He'll be taking care of keeping all the nastiness away from my blog and from me. Any comments will have to go past him.
Ok.. not really, but I wanted a pic for this entry and I thought he was stunning and had that intimidating look down pat ;)
Because I thought it would help facilitate the flow of conversation, I recently removed comment moderation when Blogger made the changes allowing for notification of follow-up comments. I wanted to let you know I've decided to revert to reviewing comments before they're published for the world to read. Hopefully it won't impede the conversational flow too much.
I've always wondered what makes people persist in leaving mean comments. Worse, I cannot understand why someone would harass a total stranger. Mean comments are mildly annoying but some people take it past that to actual harassment. Being harassed doesn't frighten me nor will it deter me from doing what I want to do. It just moves me to action.
Thus the real gatekeeper. I've had one for years but didn't really use it in that capacity. My real gatekeeper is a web traffic monitor that allows me to see the IP address of those who visit my site and for those who comment (all I have to do is check the date/time of the comment against the "gatekeeper" log). Through this web traffic monitor I can identify a commenter's internet service provider and the city, state, province and country in which they live. As I'm sure everyone knows, there are laws about harassing people and about threatening people. "No" means "no". "Leave me alone" means "leave me alone". I'm not talking about nasty comments here. I speaking of actual threats and harassment.
With the writer's IP address accessible to me not only from here but in any emails I receive, I can make sure the authorities have everything they need to remedy problem situations. Thus far I haven't seen any action that would make me notify the police, but lately a couple of people have moved closer to crossing the line.
I won't be intimidated. I won't be harassed. I know what to do to stop it.
posted by Lady Julia @ 2:24 PM
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3 Comments:
Dear Lady Julia,
I am so sorry people make bad and threatening comments. Please know that you have many fans who love you dearly; not least, myself. Also you are the last person who needs their honour defending, never the less, you have my sword, anytime!
In my other life, I have an online presence that also attracts some weirdos. I've been mail-bombed several times, and at least once had so much mail (with huge attachments) emailed to my account that it was virtually unusable. I've had (fake) pictures of myself posted online, and have had people "spoofing" my email so that obscene posts made to certain groups appear to have been made by me.
Like you , these people don't know me from, er, Adam. But for some reason they have a real issue with some of my outside interests. I've had to resort to comment moderation a few times. It's annoying, but I've taken the perspective that it's a kind of badge of honor.
But then, you know the old saying: God must have loved idiots; he made so many of them.
Out of ignorance people sometimes do things which cause much unhappiness. Unhappiness for others. Unhappiness for themselves. It is unfortunate that not everyone understands respect for others and often fail to show it, but that is no reason for you to withdraw from that which you love, especially since that which you love brings so much joy to so many. Hopefully those few who do not understand respect today will be wiser tomorrow.
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