Hasta La Ideas

With the rising temperatures in the northern hemisphere, we’ve had a similar influx of spammers, trolls, link dumpers, and general negative attitudes in our comment section recently. Thankfully, it isn’t a large percentage of our comment traffic that is behaving this way. However, it’s significantly larger than what we’re accustom to and monitoring it is starting to interfere with our work flow.

As a result, we thought it might be nice to review our comment policy to help everyone play fairly in the comments for the rest of the summer:

1. No nasty grams. Nasty grams are clutter, so we clean them off the server the same way we throw away junk mail in our homes. What is a nasty gram? Ad hominem attacks, filth, things you would never say to someone’s face or in front of your boss, and offensive statements all qualify as nasty grams.
2. Broken link/spelling error notifications. We prefer that you e-mail us when we have broken links or spelling errors in our posts, but if you do tell us about our mistakes in the comments, we’ll delete your comment after the problem is fixed in our post.
3. Advertisements. These are usually left by spam bots on old posts and we have a script that deletes these automatically.
4. Link dumps promoting your site/product/brand. If you’re someone we know in the real world, we might keep up your links because we can vouch that they’re safe and reputable. If we don’t know you, your links might disappear because we can’t verify you’re not a spammer.

We love the vast majority of our commenters, our readers who share insights, suggestions, personal stories, and encouragement for the benefit of others. Our guess is that most of the spammers, trolls, link dumpers, and negative Nellies aren’t regular readers of the website — they’re people who swoop in once and then swoop out never to be heard from again. Reviewing our comment policy will hopefully discourage these folks from taking up root in our amazing community.

In short, this is a blog called Unclutterer. We’re people who obviously are not fond of having clutter in our homes, so we try our best to keep it off the site. We encourage an active and robust comment section where people can exchange ideas and insights while being respectful of others.