Blog comment rules

If you haven’t commented before, read this.

This blog is moderated. You can contact webmaster Ralph Maughan at rmaughan2@cableone.net. The other webmasters are Ken Cole and Brian Ertz.

Your first comments to this blog go directly into the moderation box and must be approved by the webmaster. Every day new people are approved. About every two weeks someone is disapproved.

After your first comment is approved, your future comments might appear automatically. Permission to comment might be revoked for any reason. Due to the controversial nature of the issues discussed, hard experience tells that a completely open forum would be a string of insults. We don’t want this to be a forum for free floating emotion. There are quite a few strangers who show up and post a troll. They are usually removed unless posting them would seem to bring the embarrassment they deserve.

It is probably not a good idea for your first post to ridicule or insult the readers and editors of this blog. Comments such as those are common and usually their authors are blocked from making future posts. For obvious reasons it is especially unwise to make such comments from a government owned computer.

We also frown upon the use of Nazi analogies when speaking of wildlife issues. To understand this it is recommended that you understand Godwin’s Law.

We can see your email address, the screen name you use, and your IP number. Readers can only see your screen name and any link to your web page you elect to provide. Although potentially libelous comments are removed, you are legally responsible for them should we fail to locate them.

Please use a valid email address. If we find it is a fake, you will not be able to post anymore. We sometimes try to email new commenter before their comment is allowed through to see if it’s a valid address. Do not try to fool people by using different screen names and fake email addresses, your IP number doesn’t change. We can see what you are doing. The same is true should you issue a threat to someone.

We’ve found that people who think their comments won’t be let through are more likely to use a fake email address. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ever since stronger moderation has been used to guide this blog, readership has gone up (doubled), so it appears to be effective.

Note too that spam, which you will rarely see, is an ever present problem with all blogs, especially those with more readers like this one. Hundreds of spam posts are often received here daily. WordPress (the host of this blog) uses a routine (Akismet) to automatically try to detect spam. Akismet yields more false positives than false negatives. In other words, your comments can unintentionally end up in the spam queue. The best way to avoid this is not to have more than one hyperlink in your comments. Multiple hyperlinks are a leading characteristic of spam sent to blogs.

We try to go through the spam and pull out valid comments, but when faced with reading through a couple hundred unpleasant attempts to take you to porn sites, lead you to web pages that try to download a Trojan horse, or sell you dubious products, this task is often beyond our patience.

While Ralph Maughan is the primary webmaster; Ken Cole and Brian Ertz frequently moderates and posts. The Wildlife News is supported by the Western Watersheds Project by the partial provision of two employees. The Wolf Recovery Foundation also participates.
Ralph Maughan