Comment Policy

Recently – that is, as of May/June 2012 – Shattersnipe has begun attracting enough blog traffic that, as is seemingly inevitable on the internet, trolls and abusive commenters have begun making themselves known. Some species of comment policy is therefore in order. Up until now, I’d been hoping that common sense and courtesy would carry us through, but in the absence of universal human decency, know ye this:

If you direct abusive language at another commenter – particularly if that abuse is sexual, sexist, homophobic, ableist or racist – the offending comment will be deleted and replaced with the reason for the deletion. Such action will be taken wholly at my discretion. If your abuse persists, you will be banned without mercy. Public and private records of any such abusive or otherwise problematic comments will be kept as evidence and/or circulated as proof of the existence of sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, racism and/or ableism as the need arises. Anything you say which I find hilarious for the all the wrong reasons will similarly be circulated for the purposes of enlightenment and mockery. As this blog is both publicly visible and my personal space, I have no compunction about applying any aspect of this policy retroactively – meaning that if your behaviour prompts me to update this page to cover something specific that wasn’t previously mentioned, I will enact the new policy against you. Consider this a sort of blogging caveat emptor: let the poster beware, specifically of their own potential for asshattery and my limited tolerance for it.

In very special cases, if a comment makes such outrageously offensive and poorly generalised statements about a particular group of people – women, for instance – I will fliphammer it: meaning, I will go through and change every reference to the target group to either its commonly-held opposite or some other category of humorous thing, the better to illustrate its inanity. This will not stop me, however, from mocking the original comment in full elsewhere.

Otherwise: use common sense. If you have a point to make – and if you can make it without abusing anyone – then go right ahead. Disagreement is encouraged, but absurdity will be mocked, and anything deemed to make this a hostile space (as judged by me) will be either removed and/or considered grounds for banning. To give a very specific example: anyone who tries to mansplain about why Theodore Beale isn’t a screaming racist, or who otherwise comes to his defence as though his arguments are the arguments of a reasonable, non-bigoted person, will likely be banned outright on the grounds that I Do Not Have Time For This Bullshit. Also, please note that phrasing an absurdly offensive point “politely” doesn’t stop it from being offensive: I will still ban you for making this a hostile space, and for making it clear that rational dialogue isn’t something you’re interested in. Unless you’re being openly abusive, as per the above, I’ll generally give you a chance to explain yourself, but if your whole argument can be roughly summarised as “the type of oppression you’re describing doesn’t exist and/or I HAVE FREEDOM OF SPEECH STOP TELLING ME NOT TO BE RACIST” (for instance), then, yeah: prepare to be banned. There are plenty of places on the internet where that sort of oblivious fuckery is tolerated, if not openly welcomed, but this blog isn’t one of them. Deal with it.

Policy last updated 31.3.14