I wish my enemies would know me better

Running a blog entails a lot of difficulties with people who are very opposed to your opinions. Particularly the issue of comment moderation is an extremely tricky one. People who followed this blog for some time should know that A) I do have problems handling this issue, and B) one flaw I have is talking excessively about the issues I have. So over the time I received tons of comments and mails asking me to shut up already about comment moderation. As you can see here, it didn't work.

I have run many experiments on comment moderation, with and without anonymous posting, with and without pre-approval necessary, and everything from letting all comments through to turning all comments off. And in all these years I have been extremely open about what I was doing. I wrote terms of service. I always explained which comments I let through and which I moderate. I've had long e-mail discussions with people who felt their comments were unjustly moderated.

So given my flaws of talking too much about comment moderation, I am somewhat insulted by Syncaine's accusation that somewhere over the last weeks in some thread he made ONE comment that would have completely destroyed my argument, and I deleted that comment secretly without telling anybody and am now denying it. The most generous interpretation I can find is that he is simply mistaken, and his comment was victim to some technical glitch. I didn't even find it in my spam filter. But right now I'm not feeling very generous, and I find it more likely that Syncaine just made that story up.

It is so damn easy to point a finger at me and say "Evil Tobold deleted my brilliant arguments refuting his point!", without even mentioning what that argument was. It is a classic "I said, he said" situation, where the existence of said comment can neither be proven nor dis-proven. Thus it makes for a brilliant accusation, as I can't defend myself against it. Even me pointing out all the comments of Syncaine I didn't moderate (in spite of some being borderline trollish, and nearly all of the disagreeing with me) cannot prove I didn't sneakily censor that one comment nobody ever saw.

I do not need to lie about censoring Syncaine. As I said yesterday, I had enough of the guy, his insults, his trolling, and his accusations, and I am quite openly blocking him from now on. Or to be more technically correct, I will block all comments in the future signed "syncaine", which means I would block comments from other people pretending to be Syncaine, while I wouldn't block comments from Syncaine if he posted them under a different name I wasn't aware about. My blog doesn't have Real ID. :) I can live with the guy telling me I don't understand hardcore EVE players, which isn't much of an insult, and at least partially true, although I doubt the hardcore players understand their motivations much better than somebody looking at them from the outside. But when he makes up accusations that would be so completely out of character from me, I don't see the point in engaging with his opinions any further.