We’ve always taken a largely hands-off approach to comments posted here at The Truth About Guns. Our readers and their participation with the site are some of its best features and the reason so many people frequent the site on a regular basis.
We only have a couple of no-go policies around here, namely no racist comments or threats of violence against anyone. All-out flame wars are boring and clog up the page, so we’ll douse those, too when they get too long.
We rarely find it necessary to delete posts (fewer than about ten a month) and haven’t actually banned a commenter in almost a year (and only then, after numerous warnings via email).
All of that said, I’ve noticed an increase in wildly off-topic comments under some posts lately. These were obvious attempts to hijack the discussion toward a subject totally un-related to that post or firearms-related topics of any kind.
Reminder: this is a gun blog. We accept, welcome and encourage comments and discussion of anything firearm-related. Aside from the aforementioned racist or violent content, it’s all fair game here.
At the same time, completely off-topic comments for or against childhood vaccinations, the danger of water fluoridation, whether the moon landing was a hoax or not or similar non-gun related content will be zapped. There are plenty of other forums on Al Gore’s greatest invention where that content will be welcome.
I’ve heard in the last couple of days that some commenters apparently believe that we “shadow ban” some readers. We don’t have that capability and wouldn’t use it if it we did. WordPress has an active filter that pends some comments for review if they contain some obvious (and some not so obvious) words or phrases. We get fewer than half a dozen of those a day and clear them as soon as we can.
Given the size of this blog and the comment volume (we’re getting close to 2 million total comments in the system) we can’t monitor all of the comments all the time. If you see something you think is worth our attention, please email us at thetruthaboutguns@gmail.com. We appreciate the help in ID’ing comments that are over the line.
These simple polices are in place to keep TTAG the open forum for discussion that it’s always been. And none of this has been altered since we changed ownership last year. Responsibility for all of those decisions lies completely with me.
If you have something to say about the site and how it’s being run, please don’t enter it in the comments. You can send them to me at thetruthaboutguns@gmail.com. We’re pretty busy here, but try to respond to all of those emails within 24 hours (usually much faster).
Again, TTAG’s engaged, knowledgeable readers are what distinguishes us from a lot of other sites. Thank you for reading and, if you so choose, for participating in the comments. We appreciate it more than you know.
P.S. The comment section for this post is now open to any and all discussion of this or any other aspect of TTAG. Have at it.