I’m not a big fan of anonymity on the internet. Real conversations are best when they happen between real people. It’s too easy to be a jerk when you don’t have to stand by and own your words.
On the other hand, I’m also not a big fan of censorship. It’s too heavy-handed and too easy to abuse when you have the ability to make someone’s words just disappear.
So, I came up with a blog comments policy that might be, if not a *good* solution, at least an amusing one:
- If you post comments to my blog, please make sure to include your real name and your email address. The only one who will ever see your email address is me, and I promise not to disclose it or use it for anything except to contact you, if needed.
- If you don’t follow the above, the first time I’ll probably just nicely ask you to do so, and direct you to this policy.
- Failing that, I will take any future comments you make anonymously, and run them through the Pirate Speak text translator, and edit them to appear that way on the blog. Hence, your comments will still stand, and be mostly intelligible, but they’ll probably also sound pretty ridiculous.
- If you just *have* to post anonymously, you could save me the trouble by running them through the translator yourself before posting : )
There is one possible exception to this: I have a Presbyterian minister-friend who sometimes posts anonymously to various blogs she frequents, because she’s afraid that if her church ever came across her comments, they’d use them against her. While this is certainly a sad statement of affairs for the church, I can understand her need for protection. If that’s your case, I still want to know who you are before engaging in conversation with you, so if you have a similar reason for posting anonymously, just shoot a quick email to mstrlocke at gmail dot com and I won’t pirate-speak your comment.
Carry on then. Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum.
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