Rough and smooth (2)
What I have decided, at least for a trial period, is to disable the facility requiring me to moderate comments before posted, but to make it clear that I will delete any individual comment that gives me cause for concern.
I will reserve one of my e-mail addresses* for the purpose of responding privately to anyone who feels aggrieved that his or her comment has been blocked in this way.
How will I decide what stays and what goes? Broadly speaking, I do not regard it as sensible to allow personal abuse, whether aimed at others posting comments or at third parties, or indeed any comment that seems to put me or others at risk of litigation.
One more thought: if I think it likely that I will be away from internet access for more than a short time, as for example in the past 24 hours, I may temporarily activate the moderating facility. So be patient if you try to post perfectly harmless messages and then cannot see them appear for a while.
There is no way I can control what is said about me elsewhere, whether by broadcast, in print or on line. It has generally been very kind. But I have chosen to act with restraint, saying nothing about my situation that has not been placed in the public domain by others, and would ask those contributing to this blog to respect that.
Of course, there is no reason why my readers - without whom, I realise, this blog would be pointless - should not have a lively, robust and even abrasive debate while keeping sight of the virtues of common sense and decency.
And since I cannot spend hour after hour checking on each new comment, even my intended solution depends on a spirit of cooperation from you.
* colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr
By Colin Randall @ Friday, October 13, 2006 ¦
23 Comments:
I lived in Exminster for a year and came into Exeter on my Honda 70CC, blue; 50mph downhill with a following wind. £1 per week petrol. Those were the days!
I too see that Colin's blog has been removed on the Telegraph site - along with Alec's and it would appear David Rennie has taken over the French pitch - gonna being difficult, what with him living in Brussels...however.
I think Colin is very courageous to do away with the moderating but can understand that it must be soooo boring filtering through our stuff before posting it! Let's hope everyone behaves themselves...even I got zapped with the blue pencil on the Telegraph blogs - I really can't understand why - I only add bits and pieces of chat now and then (I can hear Richard grinding his teeth) and have never to my knowledge made comments that were against race, religion or whatever.
I am being a bit weedy in not understanding how to post on this site - it worked once but not since then - I shall just press 'preview' and see what happens!
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Anne, the garbage can is to send your posts to the bin!
Consult the original post again and you will see that I have added a few lines about switching back to the moderating facility - temporarily - if I know I am going to be away from internet access for a while.
That, I am afraid includes the 36 hours starting now as I am unlikely to be on line again before Monday morning. Even doing this has just cost me 15 euros in a Parisian hotel (I live nowhere near a common-or-garden internet cafe).
Thanks for your co-operation so far...and yes, thanks to advice from Sarah, I am now conversant with the means of deleting individual comments.......
By the gods, Colin, don't spend 15 euros just to sift through our messages. Nobody is going to hold you liable if a few off-colour comments persist over the weekend.
This whole issue would go away on its own if people could respect the simplest of rules: no ad hominem attacks. Slam the message, not the messenger. Attack their position, their opinion, even their choice of vocabulary, but not the person herself.
Funny how persistent these issues can be. I recall participating several Compuserve forums over ten years ago, when I still had to dial up from the Ardèche to Lyon or Marseille in order to connect to the internet, and the same questions of net-propriety were already being debated.
Blogging is self-expression. It's supposed to be fun and interesting, both for the writer and the anonymous wave of readers. When moderating reader comments becomes a chore, you have to wonder if it's really worth it.
Cheers, --- Phil
http://bensmultiverse.blogspot.com/
Oh dear, Anne - you are having trash problems aren't you? Even I understand it ... if you don't want to post the message you have just written, you press on the trash bin and the posting disappears. You can't trash other peoples' comments - only Colin can do that if he is online at the time.
Thank goodness you don't live here (en Suisse) as to understand their trash and recycling rules needs a degree - so far I have discovered that you cannot dump your trash from 10pm to 8am - which is great if you live near a bottle bank as I used to in France. We have bins for paper, glass, plastic bottles, milk packs, garden waste, and one for whatever doesn't fall in those categories (ordinary household stuff) - there are probably more but you kind of give up the will to live after a certain time and either need an enormous kitchen or back yard to recycle all this stuff.
So consider yourself lucky that you only have to worry about the little trash can at the end of your posting.
PS I forgot about battery recycling and used printer cartridges...
Haven't seen any rats here so far ... maybe living high up in the mountains doesn't agree with them - they prefer the rather muggy atmosphere of Lausanne. Personally my trash gets trashed by foxes and pine martins (and something that looks suspiciously like my dog every now and then).
Perhaps I should try putting a label on my dustbins saying "Offensive smelling trash".
You're sounding a bit bitchy today Anne! No, la Suisse isn't 100% squeaky clean and your rat sighting proves it. Have you trashed your poems or what?
Oh, good! I'm not the only one not able to post on the new blog Bill! However, am now on the supper run, so don't have the time.
A poem please, Anne!
I was going to say on the latest blog that of course we get on without Colin - having all been in training for months on the Telegraph blog when we had to guess at what time our postings would appear (if they appeared) we have all become dab hands at this lark - what are dab hands by the way? I am sure one of you lot will know, and avoid me having to google it!
I’m not sure we need to get into the spiritual realm Bill. A more down to earth explanation would be that he has grown a big head. He has more posts than the 99 Telegraph blogs put together. I don’t have too much time to blog right now but I’d just like to get it clear once and for all that I intensely dislike people who are against ad hominem attacks. I think they're hypocritical creeps.
Come on Bill am I supposed to say I disagree with everything that Bush does but I think there is nothing wrong with him as a person. English tosh. Let's be international. Great poem Anne, though unfortunately Swiss food is not that fantastic. Reasonable in the French and Italian bits,German elsewhere.
Hey Anne we're not here in sad defeat. We finally get a good blog without some young snobs filtering our comments.Have you noticed all the excitement on the Telegraph? No defeatism allowed. Now if you've fallen out with Bill that's a ladies right. By the way I never understood your rubbish bin problems, I don't have any.
Well done for the poem, Anne. I'm sure we were all missing them.
Yes Bill, running at supper is very Swiss, or French, or English as far as I'm concerned. It involves dishing out the most enormous quantities of food in overdrive mode to children who are 'starving' and leaves you feeling like you have just run a marathon by the end of the meal - know what I mean?
I see that today is blogging day - why in the hell do we have to have 'days' to do things - I do hate it so. Are people's lives so pathetic that they have to be told what to do on certain days of the year? Obviously. Talk about sad anoraks.
I vaguely heard something last night on the TV about blogging - in respect to whether, as a blogger, one was responsible for the postings on a site ... or not. It would appear that French law at the present time is unarmed to cope with this - personally I think that as a blogger, Colin, as long as you post nothing that can be deemed as racist, sexist or whatever, you cannot be responsible for postings on your blog that go off the tracks. To me this appears logical - unfortunately the law seems to work in wonderous ways nowadays!
We are supposed to do something vaguely historical today and blog about it.
My day: work, take youngest swimming, have a lovely dinner, bed.
Nothing really to write home about...
Hi gals and guys I need your help. Sarah has kindly asked me to fill in the gaps in her sex life, with my imagination. I didn’t want to turn her down but I am afraid that my imagination may not be vivid enough to handle this task. I don’t have an awful lot to work with. Her blogs are full of hoovering, shopping, schooling,cooking but there is just one enormous and suspicious exception , the boyfriend. We know she likes experienced lovers but the requisite experience is not defined. Also she’s not too fussy; Colin Berry has been accepted as a lodger. She talks of early biddydom, but that is a too obvious red herring for any serious Agatha Christie reader to swallow. We know that she is going to bed early tonight after a delicious meal (with whom) and will do something historic (à deux one can presume). Now Louise you who sneak up to Orléans to meet your boyfriend, surely you can read more into these blogs and point out the tell tale signs. Bill you are always very perceptive, what do you see? Anne your poems suggest you have a fountain of experience in life and can detect the subtler nuances. Might not God be able to see through the bed sheets?
Try PetiteAnglaise's blog, Richard. It gets quite saucy in there...
However, while I may be discretion itself in my blog, my book is another matter!
Sarah you have to wade through too much newly hatched frogspawn for my taste. I'm looking forward to your book. Don't get distracted by the lodger, who wastes everybody’s time.
Coooo, Sarah - you're being set up as a real Mata Hari, aren't you? The boys are falling over themselves!
Hmm, there are worse cyber reputations...
Now Louise don’t get jealous we all know you are having your fun in the orléans area. Getting up to things that by self censorship we cannot describe on this blog. Indeed things that involve so many four letter words that the Concise Oxford Dictionary is no longer concise. But I will find a forum, somewhere, to publish and be damned. Maybe dreams and daemons, if it works, would be the kind of poubelle site for this content.
So I figured out where it all happens. Vendôme, I go there often. It is a beautiful medieval town on le Loir (no spelling mistake, le Loir is a tributary of la Loire) As so often in the Centre we have medieval towns that were rich in the 16th and 17 th centuries but subsequently the frenzy of the industrial, commercial, and service revolutions passed them by. They are now being tastefully modernised but without the horrors of the Disney land Chilterns. I always pay my respects to Sire Rochambeau who has his statue on the main square. He was a colleague of Lafayette and heroically fort with the Americans in the war of liberation against the tyrannical if incompetent English. I wonder why Canada was liberated so much later.
There is a pleasant restaurant in a converted water mill for lunch. You can sit right next to the water wheel encased in glass. The reason I go there is more reputable than yours. It is the Centre National des Compteurs. Yes the National Centre for Story Tellers. The English have a top world class reputation for telling stories. So they asked me to come along as a whopper consultant. But what they can’t understand is that we English don’t need training, fibs come to us naturally.
Sorry for the spelling mistake, conteurs of course not compteurs. Everybody knows the English can't count.
Yes, lovely place Vendome - but you are wrong Richard! And no the boyfriend doesn't live there but, horror of horrors, in ENGLAND!
Conteurs et compteurs - sounds the same, doesn't it - but as you remarked, spelt differently and not quite the same thing - although lots of frogs go to their accountants and tell them long stories!
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