Yesterday, I had cause to delete a comment. It doesn’t happen often, but when someone becomes increasingly abusive and arrogant, I lose patience.
Charcoal accused me of deleting his comment because I disagreed with its content. Yet the evidence of my engagement with his earlier comments is still there; testimony that defies his accusation.
If someone comes into your home and behaves like an arrogant, patronising oaf, in all likelihood, you will show them the door pretty damned quick. I gave Charcoal one chance to engage politely following his arrogant accusation. He declined, preferring more insulting behaviour, so the comment was deleted. Ultimately it was deleted because;
a; he was trolling,
b; he was being deliberately insulting,
c; he repeatedly refused to engage with the topic.
I’m generally relaxed about people going off topic, but in this case, the commenter persistently refused to engage with the salient point of the post – that of spamming old posts with irrelevant links. Given his generally robust defence of this practice, there is only one conclusion to draw – we got a live one here.
Absolutely right. Your blog, your territory, your decisions. You have every right to tell these pillocks to piss off.
This is about quality and content, and if you want to go down the road of posting spam that’s your choice. Equally your readers make their own choices, too. What Charcoal seems not to understand is that he/she is a guest. Manners are just as important as robust debate, but there comes a moment when one needs to remember whose house one is in…
There are two things here that are interesting. I was happy to engage with the points Charcoal made – yet on each return, he sidestepped what I was saying; in particular, the main thrust of the original post. His comment that you sell sweet FA without a page 1 Google ranking is palpably untrue. Generalisms usually are. There are plenty of businesses selling their wares quite happily without any Google presence whatsoever.
It was fine, though, until he pompously announced that he had been “educating” me. Going into someone else’s place and patronising them generally earns a smack in the mouth – or at least, it should. I wonder if this person behaves as badly in real life? And, disagreeing with someone is not the same thing as a closed mind – how to win arguments and convince people of the validity of your position, eh?
The second point is that this was never about Internet commerce, it was about a desire to buy space on my blog for some spammy links. A little research tells you all you need to know about patternspace.net. This point was resolutely ignored by Charcoal. Indeed, his penultimate comment – the one I deleted – lectured me about old posts and rel=nofollow – as if I was too thick to understand (actually, it wasn’t what he said, it was the manner in which he said it that earned the deletion). Yet, had he bothered to read the original post, he would have realised that we are talking about placing retrospective (and therefore, manual) links thereby sidestepping rel=nofollow. The last couple of comments were merely puerile name-calling. The man is a jerk.
I’ve just read that thread. Perhaps your launching into a tirade calling him an “arrogant, self-righteous little prick” was the problem. Or is abuse a one-way street?
If you go into someone’s home and behave as Charcoal did, you would be asked to leave. My response was remarkably restrained considering the arrogant, pompous and self-righteous attitude taken when challenged over a demonstrably false assertion. Basic civility is not difficult and I would expect as guest here to behave as a guest in my home – that means not patronising me and not behaving like a pompous prick. I had up to that point responded reasonably to his arguments. The least I can expect is that civility to be returned. It was not.