Basics of etiquette for the Mormanity blog: Civil, on-topic dialog is the standard I ask for. Shouting offensive remarks is not participating in civil dialog. Off-topic posts are frowned upon. Links to anti-Mormon sites are generally unwelcome: I don't want to increase their page rank on Google and don't want to send people there as a general rule. Yep, there's my horrific, benighted bias out for all to see: this is actually a PRO-Mormon blog.
Long essays posted in numerous chunks do not strike me as civil dialog, but as unwelcome hogging of bandwidth with a monolog. If you can't make your point in 4000 characters, you aren't going to make it in 80,0000 split across 20 comments in a row. People aren't going to read that. I'm not, anyway. If you have a long essay, get your own blog and share it. It's easy and it's free.
Remember, this is Jeff's blog. Not a place for you to do and say anything you want. If I object to what you're doing and delete a comment, it doesn't help to come back and tell me what a vicious hypocrite I am. Tell your story of being viciously repressed by me elsewhere in anti-Mormon halls where you may receive a hero's welcome.
Think of this blog as a neighborhood party with free food. I create a dish occasionally and put it out on a table in front of my house to let neighbors and others come buy and taste it, with an expectation of politeness. I allow them to put sticky notes on the table responding to the dish I've prepared. Some like it, some don't, some have suggestions on alternate recipes. But if a sticky note is objectionable or if someone tries to blanket the table with their own sticky notes accusing me of serving poisoned food or cooking babies, or if someone wants to hog up the whole table for themselves with zillions of sticky notes, I reserve the right to yank a few off. You can be offended, but you have no rights to demand anything more from me.
If you are fuming with anger as you type, first go to Wal-Mart and get a free blood pressure test. If your you're above 135/85, go out in a field,, sit down, and meditate for a few minutes. Oh, check where you are sitting first, especially here in the dairy state of Wisconsin. Relax, cut down on sodium and fried foods, work out a bit more, and once the blood pressure is normal, then write a more calm entry. This is not a place to express anger and hatred, as valid as you may think those emotions are. It's a place for civil dialog. On-topic dialog.
If you post the same thing or nearly the same thing four or five times, I frown upon that. If you are promoting a business or an anti-Mormon website, I frown upon that. Angry insults aren't helpful. Links to YouTube videos are suspect unless I know the source or know what's in it because I've had people give links to videos that start off OK and then become highly objectionable and I really don't have time to screen them.
Recognize that Blogger has an automatic spam feature. One recent poster has 23 entries sitting in the spam area of Blogger. He thought I was sitting here deleting them one by one and that I have not banned his name from comments at all. Not so. What he posted over and over fell into the spam-like filters that I didn't create. This can happen to good posters as well and I can go in and manually clear them, but sometimes that takes a while for me to notice and fix. If a comment disappears a few seconds after you post it (refresh to check), it was probably the automatic spam filter. Adding links, especially lots of links, to a post seems to be the main way to trigger it. If you are sharing a link, I suggest copying your comment before sending it to make sure it clears the spam filter. I think the spam filter might recognize "bad behavior" from a single IP address or screen name, but I'm not sure. Interesting that so many comments from one poster would be captured as spam. Sorry, but that's not necessarily because Mormons are toxic.
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