The Playground

Receiving spam is one thing, annoying but relatively harmless. Receiving death threats and personal attacks is another thing entirely. Kathy Sierra, a blogger at Creating Passionate Users, has for the last month been receiving abusive comments and death threats on her blog, and even other people's blogs. You can easily delete such comments but the bad feelings these comments create can't as easily be ignored.

Tim O'Rielly has drafted a Blogger's Code of Conduct following Kathy's ordeal, and many of the 330 plus comments on his site are against his idea.

This is what he is proposing:

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7. Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.

Lots of bloggers already have their own terms of agreement that are similar to this, and to try to enforce it would make commenters even more reluctant to have their say. Tim has created badges to let users know the code of conduct required on the sites they visit: the Sherrif's star for those that enforce it, and a free for all image for those sites where anything goes.

I don't plan on signing up for this when it is introduced, and probably won't leave comments on sites where I have to sign an agreement. It's enough that we have authenticated commenting in place, without this extra constraint.