We co-bloggers here don't have time to read all comments, never mind to moderate and determine if they're worth saving, editing or banning. It's a fair amount of extra work for any of us to monitor the comments that way, and in some cases, we'll delete comments and/or ban people altogether to save ourselves the extra work.
This is done solely to safeguard our comboxes for visitors. We, like any blog, reserve the right to moderate the recent kind of nonsense out of our community. This is our prerogative, to make this a safe place for people to have intelligent discussions and to learn something, even if they disagree with us.
To those who know we're speaking to you: Clean up your acts, come with intelligent, informed, fact-backed and educated debate and have some respect. Especially if you expect any of that--most importantly, respect--in return.
We've seen your test posts to see what kind of moderation goes on here. We know who the trolls and trouble-makers are.
If you wish to keep professing stupidity, obscenity, poor education, misinformation and/or ignorance, if you want to keep posting baseless insults, attacks and derision, you've earned your own ticket to the exits.
It would be a pity, because at the AfterAbortion blog, we have several pro-choice friends and have learned to be a community even if we disagree on some things.
Several commenters lately have proven they have no intention of learning anything or of partaking in a community with anyone but diehard, rabid abortion and Obama supporters.
This blog is not for the frivolous enjoyment of anyone looking to harm, insult, ridicule or foment misinformation and/or hatred. Even those no longer welcome would agree that "free speech" is not right to include those kinds of speech.
Several of us have tried to address many of the claims and issues some of you have posted. It is only met with complete denial of the facts and more of the same derision and completely misinformed ranting.
We're sure you can find obscenity-riddled, liberal, abortion-supporting, disrespectful, Obama-idolizing, media-believing blogs and chatboxes elsewhere on the web. This surely isn't one of them.
If you wish to spend time here again, you may petition Timothy, the founder of PLB (see the CONTACT page), for your request to be considered. Bear in mind that we all have day jobs and the decision to leave the ban in place may still be made without response, again only to save ourselves the extra work.
UPDATE: As one of the now-banned trolls threatened Annie personally, in writing, in December 2008, the commenting system was adjusted to allow only authenticated commenters. Most of our regular commenters are already authenticated, and it is an easy and free process to become so, if you aren't already. You can still comment anonymously, but must submit a valid e-mail address for such comments. However if that is abused by the offenders, this may have to be modified as well.
Should the troll problems continue we may have to modify this further to allow only trusted commenters, which is still easy to do and only takes a little more set-up work on our (the co-bloggers') part. The following describes the differences and advantages between "authentication" and "trustedness".
For any commenter who would like to comment respectfully, intelligently, factually, without malice, threat or insult, and you find yourself unable to submit such comments, please contact the PLB blog's founder (SEE THE "CONTACT" page) with the details. The best effort will be made to try to respond.
