Commenting
Last weeks posts to this site elicited some comment, which was nice…
At least one regular reader complimented me on my tale of woe about getting caught short on my bus ride home from Leeds, saying I appeared to be back on form.
At least one regular reader mentioned that he enjoyed my story about my ongoing war with my rapidly disintegrating automobile.
At least one regular reader, in a fit of rampant paranoia, rang me at 8:30am one morning to check that I wasn’t ‘having a dig’ at him in my article about viruses.
The Plastic Taff, while no doubt dreaming of his next trip to Morrisons, mentioned that he was disgusted at my use of the ‘F’ word in the joke about Widdle Wabbits. However, it doesn’t quite have the same impact if the python ‘didn’t give a flip’, so I stand by my editorial decision to let it be in that respect.
And at least one other person congratulated me on the sheer hilarity of said joke.
So, you can’t win ‘em all.
I was also approached by a member of the bar team at one of the local hostelries in the village, who pointed out that a discussion going on in the comments section of the article ‘I Don’t Normally Post On A Saturday But…’, contained a slight inaccuracy. The inaccuracy related to the fact that I failed to mention that ‘no purchase over the bar’ is necessary to take advantage of the (increasingly reasonable seeming) cash back deal at the Kings.
Consider the blunder fixed and accounted for, and apologies to anyone who may have been inconvenienced by this.
I did mention to the person in question that he/she is more than welcome to post such comments on the website. However, they then mentioned that they were reluctant to do so, as ‘you don’t always allow comments to appear if you don’t agree with them’.
At this, I was perplexed. Aside from the odd occasion when I have deleted comments en masse – having given up any attempt at fair moderation in the face of overwhelming amounts of Spam – which I have nevertheless always apologised for, I have always allowed any comments to appear, with the exception of the following:
1. In response to posting a picture of Steve Gerrard, which portrayed him as just having stolen some football trophy or other, I was literally inundated with death threats – well, 3 – from disgruntled scousers who made liberal use of badly spelled anglo saxon swearwords. I thought that as the comments in question were off topic, offensive and not related to matters ‘Heaton’, I took the decision to attempt to preserve the family feel of the website and delete them.
2. In response to my article about Mr H and Mr K’s recent ‘dispute’ in the Kings, a local reader posted a comment hinting that Mr K was now known as ‘Biffa Bacon’, complete with a link to a picture of said Viz comic character. I chose not to allow this comment, as I felt the flames had been fanned enough on that topic, and to add fuel to that fire was not a road I personally wished to travel on, if you will allow me to mix my metaphors.
As far as I am concerned, anything goes in the comments, within reasonable parameters which would be expected in any civilized group. Swearing should automatically cause the comment to be flagged for moderation, but I will allow it unless it is gratuitous – I just need to check it first.
As in the case of comments posted by the (now defunct) New Heatonian, I will even correct glaringly obvious grammatical errors and spelling mistakes!
Gossip | | 
January 30, 2008
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