Dear friends,
I have decided to take the opportunity of a lull in my Sunday afternoon to seek your advice as to what to do about my comments policy.
After quite a few years of relative obscurity, this blog has seen a sudden and massive explosion in readership. For years I was getting about 1000 visitors per week, now it regularly gets over 20’000 visitors per day from literally all over the world. With that influx of visitors, a lot of weird, sick and outright deranged also showed up – that is normal, even 1% of 20’000 is still 200 and my sense is that the freaks are even much less than that – possibly 20 or about 0.1%. That really ain’t much, but that is enough to be a real pain in the ass, pardon my French. These freaks fall into several categories.
1) Your typical garden variety trolls
2) Obsessive compulsive racists
3) Monothematic delusional folks completely fixated on Jews
4) Nazis
5) Plain old idiots who simply cannot make sense
In the past, when my blog had few visitors I had a 100% freedom policy. Except for commercial spam, I would literally allow anything no matter who stupid or insulting. Then a little over a month ago I got really fed up with some exceptionally dumb Nazis so I decided to kick them out. Or rather then banning them, I began sending any moronically racist or Nazi post to the trash. When I asked for your inputs only one person got angry at me. Everybody else told me that they fully supported that decision and that I had waited enough. This new policy definitely helped and some of the worst offenders packed and left.
And yet I still get way, waaaaaaay to much comments about Jews and while I do not get many Nazis any more, I still get some world class idiots posting their nonsense. So I am not sure what to do next.
One thing I could do is drop my normal policy of “there is no such thing as off-topic on this blog” and require comments to remain generally pertinent to the topic at hand. But that would also mean losing the opportunity of having some very interesting off-topic comments posted. Or I could use my discretion and decide that off-topic comments I find worthwhile publishing and which not.
I could try to set up some pretty sophisticated and detailed posting guidelines, but that would be very time consuming and still probably leave loopholes.
Or I can ask you to trust my judgment and basically toss out anything I would find too offensive or too stupid. What I do not like about this option is that it sort of implies that every comment that I would allow would then get my implicit endorsement but that would be completely wrong. If, say, somebody posts a comment saying that Russia should try to vaporize the USA in a preemptive surprise nuclear strike I would categorically disagree with that, but I cannot say that this is not a legitimate comment in a threat discussing Russian options to stop US aggression. But if I do let such a comment through, would that not look like an implicit endorsement?
Bottom line – I need some advice from you all. I consider this blog as much yours as it is mine, and I want it to meet your expectations. I do not want to allow freaks and morons to pollute it, but I don’t want to censor it either. So, please, post your suggestions here or email me.
Many thanks and kind regards,
The Saker
hey saker,
I think it is wrong (!) to delete those nazi and anti-jewish statement. Why? because they also show what is going on. They are also a mirror of how fucked up we as people have become. Same time their spam really sucks.
So my suggestion would be to open up a new segment: “Statements from another planet” or something like that- and all messages that do not fit: move them to this special “spam” segment.
That means:
you do not censor
you document your discomfort
you allow a discussion even with interesting off topics in the main topic.
No idea about how it is in Russia, but in Germany by law you have to remove some statements completly bc it is required by law. Like: kill all jews or something like that.
If this is also the case in Russia in some way, my approach would be like:
from xxx dated yyy, Moved to “Statements from another planet”
and in this “Statements from another planet” I would document:
from xxx dated yyy, deleted because of violation of law.
This way you stay transparent and you follow the law AND you also do not censor. Hence you keep you hands “clean”.
My 2 cents
R from Germany
You make a fantastic job. Do not let it spoil by freaks and troll. Ban every troll and freaks with no warning. And if technically possible put their IP on a automatic reject list.
Merci for all (Hourra Pobieda).
It took me a while to find it but this is the comment that caused the censorship. It seemed a legitimate comment to me.
So, how is it that the Jews, Oleksander Turchinov, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Vitali Klitschko, etc, have teamed up with the Ukrainian Neonazis to conduct a coup in the Ukraine.
Why is the coup always called a Neonazi coup but never a Jew coup (look it even rhymes).
The Ukrainian coup was organized by Jews; they got the most important positions of power.
So it was obviously a Jew coup. Then why the Neonazis? Simply so the lying press could say “It was a Neonazi coup.”
I think these Ukrainian Neonazis are actually a “false flag” group of Jews.
Hitler was the same. Hitler was actually a Jew.
I have gathered yet more evidence from various web-sites and people, and it gets better & better. It is very interesting;
1) Hitler ordered the tanks to stop for 3 days near Dunkirk when only a short distance away. This allowed the entire British army and part of the French army to escape to Britain.
2) Hitler refused to take Gibraltar and turn the Mediterranean into a “German lake”. There was nothing to stop the Germans from driving through Spain (their ally) and doing the job.
3) Hitler declared war on the United States.
4) Hitler refused to allow the tens of thousands of tons of weaponized nerve gas that the Germans had produced (at Dyhernfurth an der Oder) to be used. Over 500,000 artillery shells and about 100,000 bombs filled with nerve gas were found in their storage areas (mainly at Krappitz = Krapowice) at the end of the war.
5) Hitler refused to conquer Britain. After Dunkirk, Britain was totally defenseless.
6) Hitler refused to authorise the production of jet fighters. The Heinkel He 178 had its first successful flight in 1939, but the Jews Milch/Goering/Hitler showed no interest in it. The fighter version, the Heinkel He 280, was successfully demonstrated on April 5, 1941, but the Jews Milch/Goering/Hitler refused to put it into production. Hitler wasn’t interested in a plane that could travel a couple of hundred miles per hour faster than the others. Same story with the Messerschmitt jets.
7) Jewish financiers gave billions to finance Hitler’s rise to power.
8) Only the Nazi’s attempted to kill Hitler. The Americans, British and Soviets made no attempt to kill Hitler. It is known that the British refused to allow a number of feasible assassination plans to proceed.
9) An article from “The Jewish World” tells us that Hitler, Goering and Himmler, all have close relatives living as religious Jews in Israel today. Namely,
Hitler’s nephew’s grandson,
Matthias Goering – great-nephew of Hermann Goering, and
Katrin Himmler – the great-niece of Heinreich Himmler.
See: http://ou.org.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/ja/5766/summer66/11_17.pdf
10) In 1932 the Jewish genealogist Karl Friedrich von Frank published Hitler’s family tree. It was pointed out (June 16, 1932, in the newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung) that the name Salomon, which came up repeatedly in Hitler’s maternal line, was unlikely to be Aryan. On July 14, 1933, the newspaper Osterreichisches Abendblatt published photographs of graves of various Hitlers from Jewish cemeteries and mentioned a cookbook written in Hebrew by Rosalie Hitler. Also, a number of Jewish families, surnamed Hitler, officially applied to have their names changed due to Hitler’s (supposed) antisemitism. [Hitler’s Vienna by Brigitte Hamann]
Learn from the past to prevent war in the future.
I just wanna say thank you for sharing the content and wish you all the best for your website and your whole team.
katelyn
http://www.imarksweb.org
You have a lot of sense and not a lot of time, and so do a lot of others here. To me it seems fine for you to get rid of whatever is in the way of good communication. It seems clear that you have the goal of helping others understand. How you manage it is your own prerogative.
But I like the suggestion from the other fellow that you could have a thread from the other planets and stick all the useless stuff in there. It is true as someone else pointed out that trolls indicate trends in the thinking of the other teams.
Sue
Russia Today has a workable policy. They have a list of not-allowed words and if the message has one or more of these, it vanishes when you push post. I have lost several messages so far. Regards, Amvet
Dear Saker: I’m inclined to say it’s your blog and you must do as you want.
Some of the possible situations you describe could (in the sense of might) become dangerous for you (attracting government attention or that of dangerous critics…, etc) so please don’t do anything that could in the long run endanger you or end in personal attack. However, that said, it seems to me this is purely your decision and those who might not like what you decide can leave, or feel disgruntled, or remain readers.
I do find your blog very interesting.
I am posting a non-working email address and saying so in order not to receive hate mail from disagreeable others.
howdy Saker,
i recently bought and devoured your Preatorian book. thanks for that, i don’t feel quite as alone in my assesment of Putin on the international stage.
i am, amoung other things, an avid reader of zerohedge. the comment section there has devolved into a jew hating fest over the past year and a half, reducing the informative nature of the comments section to a fringe dip into the Hate Lake”. Its a shame and, i believe, an intentional attempt to pollute a once fine, rationality based alternative site thus diluting its power.
it would be good to know what your comment policy decision was / is and whether or not it helped.
Peace from germany