This is a notice sort of blog post about some changes that have happened regarding commenting on this site as well as automated tweeting from this site. In short, I have been more proactive about comment moderation here and Twitter made some policy changes that I want to comply with around automated tweets.
Commenting Here
Over the past several months, I have been more proactive about removing comments that are insulting and offensive about other people.
This site has had the reputation that the comments are the wild west. Some compare the comments here to the comments in the YouTube communities or the Twitter trolls you see out there.
To be perfectly clear, I do enjoy sarcasm, I do enjoy reading debates, I do enjoy people calling each other's statement wrong and invalid and I do enjoy a heated comments area.
But where it goes over the line is when someone uses personal attacks in their arguments. Calling someone names, making fun of how someone looks, their race, their religion, their family or whatever is uncalled for. I said this a couple times in the past in my blog posts but this is the first time I've said this in a blog post dedicated to be a "notice" post.
If you are insulting or offensive to someone, I will remove your comment. If you keep it up, I will ban you.
I've let it slide for people who do this to me, because honestly, it doesn't even phase me if someone makes fun of me. But I am thinking now, I should just keep a consistent and clear approach to my comments section.
You can use sarcasm, you can joke around, you can and should disagree with each other - but do not cross the line of making fun of people, being offensive, taking personal shots at people. I will remove the comment and eventually ban you.
I am human, and if I miss a comment like this, please send me an email.
Why now? Well, John Mueller of Google is right, the comments here are not representative of the overall search community.
I <3 the SEO community; however, it's awkward to say, I find a lot of the commenting on your blog toxic & not representative of the SEO community. It's embarrassing to see the abuse that folks get there, I don't want to be associated with that, certainly not with personal infos.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) February 22, 2018
I do hope you've seen those efforts to clean up the comments over the past 6-12 months. If not, this post is making it clear, it won't be tolerated anymore.
There are too many people in the community that won't comment here because of that. It is unfair to those in the community and it is unfair to the SEM community at large.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Automated Tweets
You've probably seen the announcement from Twitter on automated tweets. In short the two new policies are:
- Posting duplicative or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts you control, or creating duplicate or substantially similar accounts, with or without the use of automation, is never allowed.
- Posting multiple updates (on a single account or across multiple accounts you control) to a trending or popular topic (for instance, through the use of a specific hashtag) with an intent to subvert or manipulate the topic, or to artificially inflate the prominence of a hashtag or topic, is never allowed.
As of last night, I have stopped the automated posting from my @rustybrick account. The tweets out of @seroundtable will be the only automated tweets, that push out the titles and URLs of the blog posts here automatically. The rest from @rustybrick will be hand curated, tweeted from TweetDeck or my mobile Twitter client - but will all be done manually.
I know the Twitter policy doesn't go into affect until March 23, 2018, but I do agree with the policy overall and it should make for better engagement overall on Twitter.
Forum discussion at Twitter & WebmasterWorld.
