Comment Policy

This is a bloggy blog, and as such I like to encourage feedback and discussion. I love comments, and you should too! But there’s a few little issues that have cropped up recently that I just thought I’d nip in the bud before they get problematic.

So, here’s a few commend posting guidelines.

  1. Just be yourself. I’m sure by now you’ve already developed a sense of general nettiqite, so I’m not going to rattle off a whole heap of commandments. You’re all wonderful!
  2. Use a real name or sensible alias. If you post with the name “blackjack casino” or “bedpans galore” I’m going to be inclined not to accept your comment.
    • Optionally: use your OpenID. You’ve probably got one or more when you’ve signed up for wordpress.com, blogger, livejournal, Yahoo… If you don’t have one, it might be worth your time, and it helps authenticate and despamificate you.
    • Optionally: Use a Gravatar. It makes the place nicer.
  3. Completely at my own discretion I’ve implemented an instant blacklist for spammy comments. There’s a number of prevention mechanisms on here already that for the most part you’ll never need to worry about, but from now if you’re going to be posting comments with an overtly spam-like aura about them, you might find it doesn’t get posted.

    Here’s a quick list of words that will guarantee your comment will never see the light of day.

    • Casino
    • Hymen
    • Miscellaneous other.

    Other words that will be held for moderation revolve around gambling, drugs, and financial services, all of which are very rarely mentioned on this blog anyway. So if your comment disappears, be aware this could be the reason.

  4. I don’t believe in “nofollow” links, so all comments and urls posted will be counted by search engines. Try your best not to abuse this.
  5. Finally, a non-technical limitation: Don’t slag off my employers. Don’t slag off your employers, either. Leave that to me if I feel the need, but this is a public forum and your comments are both visible to the world, and no matter how much you disclaim it, reflective of me.

    Essentially, the golden guideline is: if you’re not sure, don’t post it.

So there’s the quick list of things that might make commenting difficult. Don’t ever let this discourage you from hitting that submit button though!

Privacy Policy

This is by no means legally binding, and I don’t think I’ll ever need to go out and get a lawyer to help me out here, but I just figured I’d let you know the specifics as to what I do with collected data.

  1. Essentially I collect data. It’s not anything identifiable, but considering the audience of this blog is usually rather small, I may at some times be able to make educated guesses as to who’s visiting what.

    This I do for my own personal fulfilment. I use Google Analytics to generate stats porn: graphs, and tables of all sorts of things like browser versions, screen resolutions, and operating system families. You should note that this is a mildly invasive process, but it’s done by almost every site you visit nowadays and your web browser offers such data up freely. If you’re ultra concerned about this you can do one of two things.

    • Turn off your computer and buy a television
    • Install a JavaScript blocking utility for your web browser and block the Google Analytics servers from running scripts. I personally use NoScript for Firefox, which stops a lot of nasties running, but have white listed this script in particular.
  2. When you post a comment, you’re asked for certain information about yourself. This is stored for an indefinite period of time for the purposes of displaying your comment. Easy.

    Your email address is optional and never published, although an irreversible cryptographic “hash” is made available to the third party Gravatar service for the purposes of displaying an avatar. This is also pretty common practise nowadays, and almost completely harmless. I’d like to encourage you to use the service, so that you can have an awesome avatar appear next to you when you post on blogs.

    If circumstances demand it, I may email you directly to let you know there’s any updates to the post you commented on. This is an entirely manual, non-commercial, and solicited process at the mercy of my discretion.

  3. The actual comment you post it still your property. You can request its removal at any time, which I will do subject to any laws that apply. Once it’s up, I’m not too keen to break continuity and bring it down again though, and these things also take up time, which is worth money, and yadda yadda.
  4. Sometimes at my discretion I’ll post photos of friends and stuff without clearance. Who doesn’t right?If you don’t like it, seriously just say the word and I’ll take it down. Same applies to copyrighted material if we want to get technical but try not to get petty.
  5. I utilise Google for advertisements on aspects of this site. If you’re a regular (or even semi-regular) reader, this will probably never impact you because I believe in that dog food analogy, and like to keep the majority of the site free of advertisements. In any case, they’ve recently implemented some extra-icky features that you may not be entirely comfortable with. You can read more about it on the Adsense blog, and if you’re really concerned about it I recommend you see point one.

So that’s that. You now know what I’m doing here and you can take steps if you don’t like it.

I would seriously recommend protecting yourself on the ‘net with the aforementioned NoScript plugin if you’re concerned about data and especially tracking (although I do no such thing here). It’s a steep, but small learning curve, and it really does protect you from a lot of web nasties.

Copying Policy

For the most part, the posts on this ‘blog are copyright myself, and are marked as “all rights reserved” entirely because that’s easier than the alternative. I’ve recently begun tagging what I deem particularly valuable posts with “attribution” Creative Commons licenses, which allows you to do nearly anything with them, as long as you provide attribution.

The rest of the content here is in a bit of limbo; Some of what’s here isn’t my content, but covered by fair use, other licenses, and whatever. This is the clincher stopping an all-out blanket Public Domainification of everything on this blog. It’s just too hard to deal with.

The bottom line is that if I had the time and inclination, I’d scour the ‘blog and tag everything I could with CC licenses, but in the mean time you will have to traverse the legal minefield that is copyright law yourself.