Comment Policy

I hope you enjoy reading my blog, and I want to hear from you and encourage you to leave comments. To ensure that comments enhance and do not detract from this blog, I’d like to take a chance to clarify a few things about commenting here.

I am myself an avid reader of dozens of blogs around the Internet, so I have come to appreciate, over the time, the usefulness of having readers leave comments. I love comments because they encourage discussion, contribute to sharing and spreading information, and clearly without comments any blog would just look like a more boring monologue. Sometimes, an interesting comment may also be the basis for a new blog post.

However, more often than not, I have seen on many other blogs that some readers (I mean, of course, when it’s not just stupid bots) happen to leave comments that have very little to do with the topic of an article, and just take the opportunity to leave some spam such as totally irrelevant links, or whatever.

I have implemented a few measures to help prevent or at least minimise spam produced mainly by bots, but I’d also like to clarify for “human” readers what is allowed and what is not, when commenting on this blog, and what I think of commenting in general:

  1. Comments are most welcome! Comments give more life to a blog through open conversation and I value them as much as I do what I write myself on these pages – and more. And I am happy already if I think that you may even bother to leave a comment. Got something to say or something to share? Whenever you have something to say that may be useful, please don’t be shy, don’t think twice and feel free to leave a comment or otherwise send me a note, if you prefer or wish to contact me privately.
  2. Links that are relevant to the topic are also welcome. I don’t care if those links lead to your own site, as long as we are on the same page and they are relevant and can be a positive contribution to a topic or help other readers.
  3. Links that are irrelevant to the topic will be deleted, and with them the entire comment should it seem to clearly have some other purpose than encouraging the conversation and contributing to the topic. Unfortunately this is something I have seen way too often and I will try to prevent it from happening here too as much as I can. So if you are only going to leave useless comments because you think this will help improve search engine rankings for whatever you are linking to, please don’t waste your time (and most importantly mine). Thanks!
  4. You are free to say what you think, and of course you don’t have to always agree with me -although you would be obviously wrong! : ) – as long as language and manners are appropriate and not offensive to either me or any readers, and as long as you respect other people’s opinions. Harsh language, profanity, offensive statements, illegal content and anything else that may not be appropriate won’t be tolerated and will be immediately deleted. In any other case, the opinions expressed in your comments are your own and I assume no responsibility for such content, therefore I may delete any comments that may violate rules outside my control should I receive by others requests to do so, subject to a valid reason.
  5. Stay on topic. Comments that look OK but bring nothing useful to the conversation may also be deleted at times. If you plan on leaving the same short comment such as the classic “Nice article, thanks” on every single post just to drop a link to your site, don’t be surprised if I end up deleting these comments if again it’s clear to me that it’s just spam. As said comments are most welcome, but I won’t appreciate any abuse.

In short, please understand that I reserve the right to edit or delete comments for any reason I deem appropriate. This is a moderated blog and comments will appear if and when they are approved according to the conditions above. Also, please do not post any private information unless you want and have the right to make it available publicly.

I think this is more than reasonable and while I wouldn’t like to put conditions on who may want to leave a comment, I think it helps to keep a good quality standard with the comments, and to be honest I strongly hope I won’t have to be policing around these pages to remove inappropriate content never meant to belong here.

To those who wish to contribute and will do so by leaving useful comments, thank you for your attention and happy commenting!