I deleted a comment today. I'm feeling a touch guilty.

Let me start at the beginning. Some of you may have noticed that the comments section has recently been peppered with mysterious messages from "Michael Sippy" stating such things as "i am everywhere" and "all your blog are belong to me."

I wrote Sippy asking him what was up with him, and he replied

"it's not me. i wrote this:

"we hereby implore you to inject chaos and anarchy into the post button by hijacking the identities and namesakes of your favorite web 'icons.'"

Okay, cute, of course Sippy would be the first to have his identity hijacked. The another comment showed up on my blog:

"and I'd like you to call me mike. or mikey."

Earlier today chatting with Gabe I talked about a large mailing list I'm on, where people were going on and on-- someone had been rude to another person, who then got snippy, and suddenly I had 20 messages in my mail box stating how this person was right or the other was... this argument has now been going on for five days.

I wondered out loud to Gabe why the moderators didn't step in and unsubscribe them. I would. I did. I used to moderate a mailing list, and I would happily unsubscribe someone who was out of line-- anyone who was rude or who used the list for spam. No problem. I just made them go away. I felt a touch guilty at this thought of my early totalitarian ways.

Gabe just laughed.

So I sat in front of the computer tonight seeing another moronic fake comment arrive on the blog. Do I delete? Do I?

and then I remembered the whole point of this site was to filter out all the noise for people who care about what I do-- designing usable humane products. Heck, my mailing list is nothing but a way to help people better the signal to noise ratio. And hell yeah, this mock-sippy stuff was noise.

I'm now a censor.

and I'm feeling a touch guilty about my totalitarian ways.

Its your voice. All you did was take Mikey's words out of your mouth.

oh I mean overwrite a 'voice' not 'message'...

you go Christina!

if the comments are from the same IP, you can put a stop to it for good by banning him/her.

It's okay to be "totalitarian" in your own realm. No one is born here or forced to come here or prevented from leaving if they don't like what you do.

Filtering the content of your personal site is not censorship. Censorship is when the government limits a person's ability to speak. You are not stopping this person from speaking. You are refusing to give him a forum to speak. This is perfectly reasonable, and extremely common- it's your site, and you have the right to use it however you like.

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