DEAR COMMENTERS, WE NEED TO TALK…

Mega nerd blog Gizmodo recently ran an open letter to the site’s commenters, so we got to thinking… maybe it’s time we do the same. We don’t make readers “audition” to be commenters like Gizmodo does, we don’t have moderators whose sole job it is to police the comments, and we don’t have all the newfangled commenting technology that they do — nor do we plan to implement any of these things — which means it’s all that much more important that we all behave ourselves here. We will never, ever impose creative limitations on MetalSucks comments that would threaten to neuter the site’s fun and spontaneity, but at the same time there does need to be a little bit of order. So, without further ado, here’s Gizmodo’s post adapted and re-tooled for our own needs:

Personal Attacks

It’s quite alright to disagree with a post, content, or opinion—but there’s no reason to make it personal and leave someone crying himself to sleep at night. No one’s asking you to write responses that begin with “dear sir, I beg your pardon, but my thoughts differ from yours,” but there’s also no need to write things like “you fucking faggit, you’re wrong.”

Epithets Against Minorities

Racist or sexist comments aimed at bands, their members or fellow commenters will not be tolerated. Use of the words “faggot,” “kike,” “nigger,” etc. will send your comment directly into the spam folder, and repeated violations including mis-spellings designed to circumvent the spam filter could lead to being banned from the site.

Annoying the Hell Out of Everyone

First! Van flip! +1! +10,000! -1! LOL! LMAO!

Those trite and tacky expressions, phrases, memes, and similar ones aren’t as funny as you might think they are. They also put you at risk of a banning—especially if your comments frequently don’t consist of anything else.

Trolling

There are some folks who get a kick out of baiting angry responses by writing some utter nonsense or playing the devil’s advocate to an extreme. Sometimes it’s unintentional and innocent, and occasionally it’s even funny, but we’ll toss you out if we notice that it’s a pattern and seems to be rubbing good-standing regular commenters the wrong way.

Whining About Content

Not everything we post will be of interest to you or maybe sometimes there’ll be too much of a good or bad thing. It happens and your first instinct might be to whine or rant about it—please don’t! You have other options, like sending an email to news[at]metalsucks[dot]net with suggestions. You can also always choose to skip the posts that either concern subject matter in which you have no interest, or are written by a MS contributor of whom you are not fond — as much as we love it when you guys read everything we post, you’re under no obligation to do so.

Obnoxious Corrections

We’re human—most of us at least—and we make mistakes. Sometimes they’re grammatical, sometimes structural, sometimes we can’t spell worth a damn, and sometimes we can’t do math. It’s OK to call us out on that with a friendly email to news[at]metalsucks[dot]net, but it’s not OK to be obnoxious and insult our education or our mothers while doing so.

Questions? Comments? Concerns?

We may’ve left out some examples of unproductive commenting, but those are some of the key issues. If you’re left with questions, we may have answers if you ask politely.

– VN & AR