A word about comments

Lately we’ve been getting a few complaints about the comments. We don’t censor or ban users unless there is a clear violation of our comments policy. And even then we prefer to err on the side of allowing free discourse, rather than risk censoring talk simply because we, or some of our users, find it disagreeable. (Of course, anything outright offensive will be removed and repeat violators will be banned.)

Please understand that some people live to provoke. If you engage such people in any way you make their day. They don’t care about winning an argument as much as getting your goat. So if you would rather not see comments by such people, the best strategy is to ignore them. The chances that you are going to change their views are slim-to-none, and the low-level of the resulting debate is unlikely to be edifying for the other readers.

Also, with regard to monitoring the site, most of our energy goes into making sure our users aren’t subject to overwhelming amounts of SPAM. We get hundreds of SPAM comments a day, most of which gets caught by our automatic filters. Unfortunately some legitimate comments get caught there as well. We try to go through the queue as often as possible, unblocking the false-positives, but we do this on our spare time and so we ask for your patience. It might take as much as a 24 hours for one of us to see your blocked post. Whatever you do, don’t re-post as that simply convinces the filter that you are a bot!

Having said all that, we highly value the community which has developed here over the past five years and the high level of discourse which has generally prevailed on this site. The best way to preserve that is to only reward those comments you feel are deserving of your attention with a reply, ignoring the rest. Thank you.

P. Kerim Friedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, in Taiwan, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. He is co-director of the film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!, winner of the 2011 Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology. Follow Kerim on Twitter.