Comments Policy
Apr 25th, 2008 by Rebecca
Since it’s been coming up on occasion of late, I feel the need to explain where I stand on comments.
In general, I am happy for Burning Words to be a venue for discussion from all sides. I don’t mind if my commenters come from radical feminist or Right Wing Death Beast perspectives, as long as they’re respectful of other commenters. It’s important to remember that, while I may be liberal with allowing comments, this is nevertheless minority space, and I do care about giving transpeople, queer women, women of colour and disabled women a safe space to express their opinions.
So, I have a few general rules:
1) Disagreement is fine. I’m a big girl. However, I will not stand for racist, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic screeds here. If they’re merely stupid, you’ll likely be merely mocked or laughed at for them, but if they’re offensive, you’ll just simply be redirected to the spam filter and yawned at.
2) Don’t be a dickhead. Although I have a low bar for it, if you’re going to comment, I’ll expect that you’ve actually read what you think you’re replying to, or are not otherwise going to be an inane prat.
3) Watch the personal attacks. Now, as a blogger, I’m generally all about the snark. I deal with stupidity and ignorance by mocking it or otherwise taking it down, and I’ll happily laugh if my commenters do the same. However, I have little tolerance for straight personal attacks, which I’m inclined not to let out of moderation. This includes behaviour such as using the wrong pronouns to refer to transpeople.
All in all, I prefer to respond to commenters spouting ignorant bollocks rather than remove their material from my website, and I dislike moderating comments out generally. That’s just my style. However, I do set some limits on this, and commenters who repeatedly ignore (or are especially obnoxious with regard to) the above will be yawned at and sent to the spam filter, or put into Bad Behaviour whenever tech geek friend of mine gets around to installing it.