Moderating Comments, and Apologies

If anyone’s been reading my blog for the last few days, you’ve probably seen the giant comment trail left on my Design and Testability post. After a lot of discussion the LosTechies community and with a few other friends, I’ve decided to start moderating comments that are significantly off-track on the discussion of content related to the post, when those comments veer off the technical or other paths related to the content of the original post. This means that I have deleted a significant number of comments from that post – including comments from good friends of mind, and comments of fellow LosTechies people. The comments were not serving the community in a manner that I feel is appropriate and were a disservice to the LosTechies readers.

I am not interested in censorship or keeping opinions out of my blog comments. I am interested in keeping the discussion on topic and related to the topic while advocating the additional discussion be taken to the blogs and other communication channels of the people who wish to veer off the related subject matters. I have, in the past, deleted other comments from other blog posts that I felt were crossing various lines and I will continue to do in the future.

I realize that I was the one who started the problems with the “Angels & Demons” section of that post, and for that I’m sorry for doing that. I was in a bad mood and wanted to toss that in just to get some reactions. It got more than I bargained for. I’ll try not to do that in the future.

However, I make no apologies to those who’s comments have been deleted. This was a very difficult decision for me, and one that I do not take lightly. In the end, the content of the deleted comments was simply not acceptable in the context of the original post and the LosTechies community.