Ruminations in Korea

This is a recycled post from September 16, 2004. It seems that adults are still unable to check themselves. Results? You suffer.

Comments

As most of you have noticed, I have discontinued the comments section of my blog. Enough people have asked why that I feel it necessary to explain and to explain My new comment and email policy.

I write this blog primarily for myself. My blog is not comment driven. Unlike many bloggers, I don’t post things just so I can see what people think of my writing and what they have to say to me. Quite frankly, I don’t really care if anyone comments or not. I write mostly for myself. I write about the things I am interested in and that I want to remember. Writing my blog is cathartic and very therapeutic for me personally.

If no one ever read my blog, I wouldn’t care. In fact, as I have said in numerous places, I originally anticipated that no one except for my brother, mother, and maybe a few friends would drop by occasionally to see what was going through my head. I actually estimated that I would get about 13 visits per month.

Now, I am getting a modest 200 - 300 hits per day. Of course, many are from people who are undoubtedly disappointed in their search for BoA, Lee Hyori, Lee Sabi, Lee Seung Yeon, Akira Fubuki, Sally Yoshino, and various other naked Korean and naked Japanese women. There are also some from the Ogrish-hunting crowd searing for Italian, American, and Korean beheadings. However, a large portion of the hits are from people stopping by to read what I have written.

When I first started this blog, I decided to open the comments section to the readers as a place for them to leave their thoughts and comments not only for me to read, but also for readers to debate issues amongst themselves. Although I am not dependent upon others’ comments, I do enjoy reading most of them and responding to some of them.

However, a few immature jackasses with too much time on their hands decided that they would make my blog their little playground. They decided that it would be fun if they posted useless, juvenile, insulting, and annoying comments to every post. They decided to insult me, my family, and other things personal to me. I would delete the completely useless and most offensive comments in order to maintain at least a modicum of civilized behavior on my blog.

I’m all for dissent, I am all for playing devil’s advocate, and I am all for wit and humor. But I would hope that it would be done in an mature manner. Simply making asinine comments trolling for some sort of response is not worth my time. I don’t want in on my blog. I refuse to clutter up my blog with the juvenile scratchings of social misfits.

I refuse to play the sorts of games that those few commentors were engaging in. As their comments were wasting my time, and as I was no longer interested in reading their immature comments, I took the step of removing the comment option from my main blog.

While I am not entirely happy about doing so, I just had no desire to read the many comments posted by those certain few.

For the time being, I have decided to do two things. One is to take the comments off-site. In the left-hand column, you will notice a comments section where anyone who wants to can leave comments in a guest-book style arrangement. I will give everyone the chance to act like a mature adult and check themselves in their comments. However, if the off-site comment book becomes cluttered with the same useless trash that was infecting my blog comments, then I will pull the plug on the comments book without a second thought. So, in short, police yourselves.

The other thing I have decided to do is to alter my email policy.

From now on, I will consider any and all email sent to ruminationsinkorea@yahoo.com to be open and not private. Thus, any email that I receive will be subject to posting at my discretion without any notice to the author. If you don’t want something posted on my site, don’t email it to me.

I will not post everything that is emailed to me. But in certain cases I may choose to post an email for whatever reason. Again, it is entirely my decision what emails will or will not be posted.

Thanks for visiting and keep coming back.