Comment moderation policy

Comments on this Weblog are moderated by volunteers according to the policy below.

The most valued comments are alternative perspectives. If the posting is about a trip to Kugluktuk, Nunavut, a great comment would start “I took a trip there 10 years ago and my experience was …”. A link to an authoritative source of information not cited in the original posting is highly valued.

The least valued comments are reviews of the posting, good or bad. The reader has just read the entire posting. He or she doesn’t need someone else’s opinion that “this was great” or “this was bad”. Reviews make sense in the off-line world where consuming the book or movie happens after reading the review and takes a lot more time and effort. In the online world, the comments are usually read after the item being reviewed has been consumed. Keep in mind that other readers are likely to be just as intelligent as you. If there is an oversimplification in the original posting or a previous comment, they’re just as likely to spot it as you. Correct facts with a link to an official source; don’t try to correct someone else’s opinion or thinking.

Comments that attack another person’s motivation, intelligence, or character are bad because they degrade the quality of the discussion and discourage thoughtful comments by others. For some reason, human beings often are confident that they can discern the hidden motivation for another person doing or saying something. Trained psychiatrists and psychologists, however, do very poorly at this task, so what hope is there for a lay person?

Cute/clever comments that are off-topic should only be published if they are very cute and clever indeed. Off-topic content breeds more off-topic content.

Attributed/real-name content is preferred to anonymous content.

10 thoughts on “Comment moderation policy

  1. Hi Phil,
    Are posts closed for comments after a specific amount of time, or is it based on activity, or something else? For example, the Audi A4 Review was September 7th, not *that* long ago, and comments are closed after about 3.5 months and just four comments?

  2. It is a default anti-spam feature of WordPress and it is time-based. Spammers like to add comments to years-old postings.

    Just another example of how cash-hungry and clever humans have defeated most of the dreams of the Internet pioneers. Nobody engineering this stuff back in 1970 imagined armies of spammers.

  3. When I click on “moderation” I see this:

    “””
    Recent Comments
    Jerry on Gillette versus Dorco Shaving Test 1
    Peter James on Gillette versus Dorco Shaving Test 1
    lion on Gillette versus Dorco Shaving Test 1
    “””

    When I click on the page itself, I do not see my comment. When I visit the page in incognito mode I do see my comment. Perhaps caching is set wrong?

  4. It was in the early new reports
    The new engines hang lower and forward so as not to reengineer the whole plane that feel they needed an anti stall system. That was not a problem there lack of notice and poor engineering on the system mixed with poor Asian piolets very bad training( southwest knew of the problem and there piolets were trained enough to actually fly a plain) remember lion air is band for us service Boeing ? Selling them plaines but it was to big to pass. Boeing had to train piolets for mChina years ago . CHINA with help has become very good. Not so in Asia south culture is different.

    • Fixed! There was an issue with the nginx cache being purged due to an SSL certificate update. It should work now! Thanks for highlighting.

  5. My comment about 17 hours ago on the post “British Medical Journal…” disappeared into moderation – in case that wasn’t intentional. Let’s see where this goes…

  6. According to my browser, the site’s TLS certificate expired on “Thu, 06 Apr 2023 23:59:59 GMT”.

    • Can you please reload? I installed a new certificate and restarted just a few minutes ago!

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