is that some people abuse it. So we have the situation where a poster in our comments boxes on Onlineblog is lobbing increasingly absurd, off-topic ramblings, spiced with the occasional libel, from behind the mask of a false name and email address (although we've got his IP address, of course).
So here's the deal. We're all for free speech, but if you want to shoot your mouth off in such a way, go build your own blog, and bore your own audience to tears. Post comments here, and there are a few ground rules - the same rules followed by 99% of posters.
If a comment to a post is off-topic, I'll delete it. If it's libellous, I'll delete it. By all means continue in the Online tradition of robust reader comment - we'll still sleep at night (hey - someone once wrote in to say I should be renamed "Neil McWintel, for his slavish devotion to all things Microsoft." How much can a comment hurt?). But over-step the pretty obvious boundaries and your comments will get deleted.
I'll see how things go over the next few days. If things don't improve, I'll turn off the commenting facility, as quite a few owners of high-profile weblogs have had to do over the years. That would be a shame. The debate here has been one of the most rewarding things about running the weblog. But we can always continue the chat in private, via email, with the many readers who have something interesting to say, or who at least have the courage to have a go at us using their real names.
