well, we’ll delete your comment anyway.
Ok, prepare yourselves. This is a post from the Marketing girl. Doesn’t lessen the value of the content below, but if you are looking to find information on the TextMate editor or how to reclaim memory…this is not it. 
For quite a while now, we’ve been removing occasional comments from our weblog. Not just spammers mind you. If someone violates our weblog comment policy, we simply remove their comment(s). It’s that simple.
Until now, we hadn’t published our policy. We just figured that when your comment was deleted, you would understand you pulled a boner move and we would all move on to the next subject. Our bad. We realized you need to know what you can and cannot do on Joyeur. State it clearly so there is no question. Most of you know. Some of you don’t. This post is for the latter.
Joyeur has a diverse audience with different sensibilities and opinions. Just remember this is our home, so we ask that you play nicely once you walk through the door. You can disagree with us, or any other commenters in this forum, but there is no need to be an ass. Good blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly, and engaged. They are not known as asses.
So, going forward:
- Please try to stay on topic as much as possible. We know sometimes you stray. That’s ok. Just try to keep it reeled in as much as possible.
- Relevant links in comments are okay, irrelevant links are not.
- Own your comment. We really don’t like ‘anonymous’ commenters and are more than likely to delete them. Be proud of what you have to say, and if you aren’t – then you should not be saying it.
- No personal attacks, hate speech, excessive profanity, or other behavior that would be inappropriate in a civil conversation.
- No spam. We don’t like spam.
If you piss in our sink, we will remove your comment(s) without notification, or appeal, and we do so entirely without shame. If someone persists in sending abusive comments, we will block their IP address. We might even pull your account if you are a customer of ours. Just depends what kind of mood we are in that day.
So don’t make us the bad guys. Just play nicely from the start.
We’ll update this post from time to time as rules change. We’ll also link it from the comment form so that nobody can claim you didn’t know about it.
And now back to your normal programming…
14 Comments
Who draws your cartoons, they are insane cool.
@Bruno
Joyent contracts Paige Pooler to draw the illustrations.
http://www.paigepooler.com/
More information can be found at the blog post listed below.
http://joyeur.com/2007/02/24/joyentcom-now-with-more-jill
Great. A marketing person defining the rules of a corporate blog. Hey, why not just get your lawyer!!!! Ass.Well, as a contributor to the IT purchasing decisions, lets say, that after this marketing experience, we just remove Joyeur from any potential bids or purchases. Now, that’s marketing, huh…
Thanks for this, I guess, but I’m not sure you’re there yet. Defining the rules is a good step, especially for a company like you guys who sometimes play things a little too seat-of-the-pants and improvise things your customers are counting on you to figure out. But I get the sense this policy is still not being very honest about your standards for deleting comments.
E.g.: There were several (more than a few) comments deleted from the post announcing Joyent Slingshot, none of which were inflammatory, attacking, or insulting, nor ran afoul of any of the standards you raise here. Instead, they were insightful but critical analyses of Joyent’s strengths and weaknesses—critiques of recent policies and decisions from well-informed customers’ perspectives. Now, it’s your blog, so you can delete whatever you like (including this post). But it’d be nice to be honest about what you delete and why, rather than making out like a critical analysis of your business practices is the same thing as a foul-mouthed troll.
Bruno,You are killing me. But, thanks.
Tim, Paige did create the original Jill, but all the illustrations are now being done in-house by Joyent staff.
Bob,If you choose to not use Joyent because the Marketing person wrote a guidelines doc for blog comments and asks you to be civil – fine. Probably in everyone’s best interests we do not work together any way.
RB,We are human, we make mistakes. The thing about it though – is we are learning from these mistakes.
I am sure posts were deleted that may have been outside the ‘guidelines’ noted above. This is the policy going forward. I want to hear it. Honestly – good, bad, indifferent. Just be civil and respond to the post at hand. I think what happens is we write something here and then a comment comes in to blast us about something else (completely off-topic) and then doesn’t provide links or a way to respond to you directly (like right now, your initials are not linked to anything, so technically you are anonymous and my only way to reach out is to post another comment). That sucks, and honestly, I would be tempted to delete it as you didn’t give me the courtesy to acknowledge who you really are. I am all about being open – but I expect this to be a two way street. That is what it all boils down to.
We have open comments available as we do want to hear from you. Just be civil. Use your real name. Provide a url or email address in the comment form so we know who you are. Stay on topic. That is all I ask.
If we did something silly, let us know and we will work to correct it. If we deleted a post and it fell within the above guidelines – send me an email: kristie at joyent dot com. We have all been guilty of knee jerk reactions, so maybe your post does need to go back up. Or maybe you were being an ass and just didn’t realize it. I will find out why and let you know.
Ok, so let’s go sit around the campfire and have us a singalong…
Is Joyent thinking of implementing OpenID in their blogs? That might be one way of encouraging people to include their contact info, or at least encourage some accountability. It would be neat if that OpenID implementation carried over into the forums as well.
The policy seems appropriate. It’s difficult to play moderator and allow “free speech”. Interestingly enough – it seems it’s usually the anonymous crowd that takes issue with policies and rules. Maybe that speaks to their accountability?
I’ve had a comment or two deleted (niether of them for attitude reasons as far as I know), and saw where they were coming from, so it didn’t really bug me. And I’ve always been a big fan of the “ownership” concept mentioned above.
However, Kristie, you seemed to strike an unnecessarily hostile tone here. If we’ll be hearing more from you in the future, I really wish you could have had a better introduction to the group.
I appreciate this professional tone being taken for once, but it certainly doesn’t help to call people “asses.” Perhaps if you expect others to be professional, you should be as well?
Additionally “We might even pull your account if you are a customer of ours” seems completely out of line, even if it is intended in a light-hearted fashion.
Ok boys – point well taken. I should be more mindful of the words I used. My bad.
Though, I must say I am kind of fond of the word ass, so I can’t say it won’t show up again here and there.
I find myself writing a comment on a blog run by a company that appears to have replaced the one that used to be here. The post is about the rules for interaction, rules needed because the criticism has gotten too pointed, the disappointment too palpable, clean language too feeble.
If we wanted push-button web hosting, we’d be over at squarespace, where it’s available now.
I know, I made the mistake that baseball fans make when they root for a team. It’s not a team anymore, it’s a loose agglomeration of very ambitious people, whose interests may be aligned for just long enough to win a title.
I am out of here. I’m a red sox fan, after all, and I know better. I’m off to look for a hosting company, where the jackboots from marketing aren’t telling the customers what to say.
I thought I had found it.
Notice: no profanity, no ad-hominem (feminem) argument. We’ll see how long it lasts.
– Former TEXTDRIVE customer.
This is all just a restatement of Jason’s Rule (last line of the post). Nothing new here.
Kristie, I suppose that’s the problem with having passionate users who are passionate about TextDrive, Strongspace, etc.
It would also be a nice to get feedback that Kristie, et. al. have deleted comments for reason x rather than comments just vanishing.
Dave – OpenID is something we are looking into. ——————-
Osmif – I am sorry you feel that way. I shall assume nothing we say will change your mind, so I wish you well.
And while I have no idea what a jackboot is (assume it is not good), this is still an open forum. We are just asking that you contribute to the conversation at hand, and contribute in a respectful manner. Not a big deal buddy. ——————-
Jacques – we have made some mistakes in the past. I think at this point and time, I would simply like to acknowledge this fact, slap a hand or two internally, set some guidelines, and ask that we all start focusing on the future. Ok?