Every six months or so, I find I have to repost my Living Room Policy, first stated in October 2006. If you want the executive summary it goes like this:
I treat people who come here with courtesy and respect, but if you are rude to me and my guests, I'll ask you to be nice, If you get rude again I will toss you out and never let you back in. I also do not let people into my home, who won't let me know who they are, then I am going to throw them out and not let them back in.
The most recent one is from someone calling himself Bob. No last name, no URL, just Bob. He put down his email as: anontroll07@gmail.com. Get it: "Anonymous troll."
You can see Bob's first two comments on my recent Open Letter to the Twitter Guys. The rest are cyberdust.
Bob has not been rude at all, even though we disagreed. He thought that since I am not a developer I did not have the right to comment on the scalability of Ruby on Rails. Now, I will submit that I may not know what I am talking about when it comes to the tech problems with Twitter, the subject we were discussing. But I maintain that on my own site I have every right to make a fool of myself intentionally or accidentally.
I told Bob about the living room policy and that if he did not identify himself I would ban him. He didn't like that and told me why I was a hypocrite demanding my own freedom of speech and demanding his right to speak in my virtual livingroom.
So I blocked him. 86. Poof. No more Bob. Bob, who claims to be a veteran developer with more than 20 years creds is now sending comments every few minutes. I may be no technical wizard and I do know how to tell Typepad to ban all comments from this anonymous troll. Typepad is sometimes slow to get it going and that means I need to play the silly takedown game tonight, but by tomorrow, Bob will be gone.
I feel good about this.
