This post is obsolete and no longer applicable. It is preserved here only for historical record. For the current comments policy see here.
It’s come time. I’m so cumulatively busy with all my work and life things, I can no longer find time to moderate comments on my blog beyond a fraction. I have struggled to keep up with the most recent and important ones, but I still have a backlog of nearly four hundred uncleared comments on various blog posts from last year. I hope to get to those eventually, since I consider them grandfathered in, although I might not answer them, for want of time.
Years ago I switched to full moderation. No comments ever post until I’ve seen and approved them. That has been extraordinarily effective at cutting down trolls to a tiny fraction, and even forcing them to start acting more like real people, in order to ensure their comments will ever post. Most importantly, it has driven away almost everyone who only wanted to graffiti my wall and became outraged that their Very Important Words will not be seen by anyone for days and days (and will only ever appear with my reply instantly attached, a fact for which I was accused of censorship, to the laughter of many).
I also don’t want to call upon unpaid labor to “hire” comment moderators to take over the task. I’m not a strong believer in unpaid labor. And I don’t earn enough to pay someone else what this job would deserve.
So, my only remaining option is to close down comments threads after a short time. I have thus revised my standing Comments Policy to say the following:
Comments Now Close after Six Days. Because I no longer have time to keep up with endless discussions in comments, I have had to set a fixed end-date on accepting comments at all. For now I am siding with Fake God on this one: after the sixth day, we rest. If you have something terribly important to send me after that, email me. Do not expect a reply. I receive a huge volume of email. I can only respond to a fraction of it. But I will at least see it. If it’s a valuable correction or piece of information, I will thank you. If it’s insulting, I will share it with my girlfriends, and we will laugh at you.
I have accordingly removed the grandfather clause of past yore (as now being rendered obsolete by this new rule) and renumerated the remaining blog rules. All else remains unchanged.
A bit of a shame, as it prevents more in depth discussion of your arguments, and could cut off the conversation before misunderstandings are addressed, or points of view are clarified (For example, I was hoping to get a clearer idea of how you define “true feminism”, and whether you view all libertarian/right-wing feminists, e.g. Wendy McElroy and Cathy Young, as inherently anti-feminist).
But of course closing comments after a short period is understandable considering the volume of them you must receive.
I don’t know enough about Wendy McElroy and Cathy Young to comment on them, but I know many Libertarian (and conservative Christian) feminists who definitely rate as feminists and not frauds. In my comments about Sommers I have essentially laid out the criteria of what makes the difference. That will have to do for now, until next time I post on feminism.
(I am relaxing my relevance rule now, so anything you can squeeze in as relevant to a blog topic will pass. So here on out that question would be valid on any post tagged as about feminism.)
Very intelligent move on your part. Good success with your new policy. (begin good humored snark – i hope) Was it only a coincidence/synchronicity that you announced this policy change on the Christian Sabbath? (end snark)
Well, it would have been funnier if it was the Jewish Sabbath.
Although I did write it then. It auto-launched on delay for Sunday.
You forgot to open with “Hear Ye! Hear Ye!
Too busy with all the girl friends, huh? Nice work if you can get it.
🙂
Mostly it’s scaling up work to elevate income.
Also, yes.
Thanks for the info Dr Carrier. 🙂 I’m a regular reader of your blog but somehow overlooked the comments policy and I apologies for trying to post an off topic comment about resurrection on a post about Bayes theorem. Btw I wanted to ask when would be a good post to make the comment about resurrection? Would any jesus related post do the job?
Thanks
Cblue
Good question!
I think I’ll relax the wording a little on topicality.
Yes, you can sneak that in any post that talks about Jesus. I’ll count it as relevant.
You and Neil Godfrey are mentioned on http://likeflintradio.com/latest-show-lfr-show-28-988 . which became available online today.
Noted. On my todo list.
Perfectly understandable, and necessary for the sort of conversations you want to keep going here. This talk of comments reminds me of one of the few comments I left on this blog, about a year ago, on this post: http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/4973
I had pointed out that Jeff Lowder had opined that Luke Barnes’s four part critique of you was “very persuasive” and “prima facie devastating” and thought, regarding some of your points, that you should issue either a response or retraction. You said you’d respond in two or three weeks. I may have missed it, but did you ever get around to replying?
Nope. That is literally still sitting in my calendar todo list. Sigh.
Hence the problem.
I very much want to catch up on things like that.
Working on it.
But it’s not going to be fast.
Thanks, Richard. I’ll look for that.
You wrote a blogpost criticizing Lawrence Mykytiuk, and he says he left a comment on that post in response but it’s been deleted. That’s fine, I take it to be a consequence of your new comment policy. And I tend to think you’re right that Mykytiuk’s article is very unpersuasive. At the same time, he seems to want to have an honest discussion with you, and it seems to me it would be useful to continue that dialogue, if not for either one of you, at least for spectators. Mykytiuk responds to you, in part, in the comments to his original article.
It hasn’t been deleted. It’s still in the queue. For him to jump to the opposite conclusion after I repeatedly explain I’m sitting on a huge backlog of comments is kind of arrogant and paranoid. He is no more entitled to my attention than any of the hundreds of other commenters still waiting.