PG received a couple of messages this morning about the appearance of a notorious troll making comments to one of his posts.
He checked the reported comments and they were, indeed, trollish, so he deleted them.
During his time on TPV, PG has been pleased with the general lack of trolls. He has only had the occasion to remove trolls and their comments a handful of times.
Please review the Comments Policy for PG’s general trollishness standards. Here’s an excerpt:
The rules on comments are simple. You can disagree with me or others, but be reasonably civil and non-abusive. Don’t demean or insult others. I’m a bit old-fashioned on language, but if you want to use asterisks or a substitute word, that solves my problem. I use a plugin that catches some language and inserts its own asterisks.
PG does have a spam filter installed on TPV, and it continues to catch a lot of spam. No spam filter is perfect, so he appreciates it if visitors point out a person/post that the reporter thnks crosses the line.
Regarding commercial announcements, here’s another excerpt:
If you’re an author, publisher, agent, etc., a low-key commercial announcement is OK from time to time, but don’t go crazy. I don’t mind relevant links in comments, but will zap comments and commenters that link to spam.
PG will note that he doesn’t remember the last time he deleted a comment that violated his low-key commercial announcements spam rule. But take note that PG’s memory is not the gold standard it once was.
As PG remembers having said several times before (he knows this is true): He thinks the comments are the best part of TPV and enjoys reading 99.99999% of them, so don’t hesitate to comment, disagree politely with PG or anyone else, etc. If you feel PG or the TPV spam filter has wrongly blocked/removed any of your comments, use the Contact PG link at the top of the blog to let PG know and he’ll check things out.
Oh, then the person was a “Troll”, I thought so when they pulled something similar a while back. That was such a fertile thread, I was happy to roll with the possibility.
In reading any writing book by Julia Cameron, she will always mention, “That if you didn’t want to be a character in one of my stories, then you should have been nicer.”
I will use the name as “character” because it is so evocative. They will never know, because they are not part of my demographic.
BTW, I want to mention that The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm has finally been released on Blu-ray, in both “Letterbox” and “Smilebox”.
Smileboxed “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” trailer in Cinerama
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVTNN3kgPYw
I saw that when it first came out. I think that I was six years old. We saw it at the Gila Theatre in Silver City. When I had cable, I would see it on Turner Classics now and then.
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_World_of_the_Brothers_Grimm
Wilhelm becomes critically ill with potentially fatal pneumonia. He dreams that at night various fairy tale characters come to him, begging him to name them before he dies.
That scene impressed me greatly when I saw it as a kid, it still does. That is the duty of a writer, to bring characters to life.
This is sixty years waiting to have a copy of the movie.