Monday 14 December 2009

A comments policy of sorts

Thanks for the forthright discussion on commenting. It seems to me that we must be allowed to criticise local businesses, as a local business that survives to an extent on charity will not last long. On the other hand I think such criticism needs to be criticism in the wider sense of the term, that is an examination and judgement of merits and faults, and one which hopefully will be useful in the context of supporting local business.

The question of anonymity is a tricky one. I don't think people should give full details, one of the beauties of the internet is that you don't have to reveal who you are (and I'm aware doing so can have negative consequences, albeit perhaps they are overstated) and on the subjects we discuss it is hardly relevant who is saying what. But the advantage of giving a name is that it at least rules out an 'anonymous' being the same person if it is not (it cannot stop one person pretending to be many), and I think there was an instance of multiple commenting recently that was unnecessary.

I have been told that people have put an email address in. I don't quite understand this as the box I see when asked to comment has four options:

Google Account
Open ID
Name/URL
Anonymous


The obvious one, if you don't have a Gmail/google account, is Name/URL or anonymous. The former formally asks the name, the latter allows you to type it in as part of your comment. Do other people have different options?

Anyway I think I should do some more posts, as I have rather relied on you all to spot and discuss things! Thanks again for your time and interaction.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am confused, when we have a google email address and we add it in the username, is that not confirming who we are.

The other bits Open ID Name URL I don't understand.
Am I being thick, or is our google username not our email address.
Seems hard to comment, when there are so many options that one simply doesn't understand.

I do agree though with not being too critical as it needs to be objective and not just venting for a bad experience.

Jenny P

Matthew said...

"google email address and we add it in the username"

yes, but you also have to put in your gmail/google mail password? Are you doing that?

Then the whole page should change

Matthew said...

where under 'choose an indenity' it has 'YOUR NAME (Google Account) - Sign out, and you'll have something like the 'matthew' on these comments when you make the comment