Okay, I've had a few days to think about it, and some encouragement from you guys, and if I let these people drive me off my blog, they win. I want to say right out that this was not caused by any regular bloggers or regular comment leavers. Even if I don't agree with the regulars sometimes, I can deal with their comments.
This was caused by a few people who are not regular recognized comment leavers who took it upon themselves over the last two years to go through and leave comments on nearly every blog entry I have made. I only know comments are left if it is an entry I have responded to and then SA sends me a notification. If it is an entry I never responded in the comments to, I don't know they've left it.
I have been working on going through every entry to remove these comments for the last two months. That's 3299 entries and a lot of time spent. A little more because I outright deleted a few of the posts. Then I found out some of them had started all over again. I just got so frustrated because I have been working so hard to clean this up.
A lot of these comments have been political, far left political, even though for the most part I keep my moderate political views off my blog. Once in a while I will say something and it just seems to trigger a new round. That happened after the post I wrote about the fires and ended up deleting. I wish we could moderate our comments here like you can on nearly every blogging site out there. Then I'd at least know which entries to look at and could keep up with it.
Thank you for being supportive. Now that I've had a chance to cool down, I've decided that I need this group too much for financial accountability and I don't want to give up something I enjoy, the community we've built here, for trolls. Maybe I'll just have to let go of trying to clean it up on old entries. Easier said than done, because I don't want it there, but sometimes you just have to let go for sanity's sake.
I have a very, very long fuse and seldom blow, but this time I did. I am sure not being able to go outside because of the smoke is contributing. We still aren't fully open because of COVID and the only thing getting me through was being able to be out in the garden. I need to get my zen back, and then I can cope with these stupid spammers again. Meanwhile, I am back. Sorry for my crazy.
Why I Lost my Cool
September 18th, 2020 at 02:21 am
September 18th, 2020 at 04:38 am 1600400306
I get an email every time anyone leaves a comment on any blog post. If you are not getting similar emails, tell James. Something is wrong in your settings but surely it can be fixed. Then you will not need to hunt for these comments through every blog post.
I think that there is room for reasonable people to disagree on any given topic. But what you are describing certainly is harassment, and there is no reason you should have to tolerate it. It sounds like the sort of thing that pathetic troll Fanny would do.
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