Tolerance

Years ago when I first got online I joined newsgroups and participated in a lot of message boards.  I was green so I took everything to heart, got easily offended and in many ways despite being a learning curve it was not a pleasant one.  I worked my butt off learning html so that I could get my own website up and running.  I was very proud of that accomplishment!  One day I opened up my email to find an extremely nasty email seriously ragging on any negative that could be found on my website.  I was absolutely devastated!  Moving on from that horrible experience I am now at the point where I successfully author eight blogs, 2 of which are by invite only as well as owning 4 Yahoo groups.  I have a very different viewpoint than when I first started online. 

I am no longer willing to tolerate certain online activity and when it comes to my blogs I am even less tolerant.  Years ago dealing with a troll would leave me in tears.  Now dealing with a troll means rejecting the comment on my blog(s) or banning the troll on my groups then moving on.  I don't lose any sleep or shed any tears.  This really becomes part of having an online presence.  It doesn't matter whether you are sweeter than sugar on you blogs there is always going to be that odd nutcase working on bursting your bubble.  I work very hard on my blogs so I'm not going to give some troll the opportunity to affect anything.  At one time I would have fussed over comment moderation.  Now I hit either publish or reject and never look back.  Occasionally a persistent troll and this really doesn't happen very often but on my HST rants on my personal blog it has where the troll will actually take their time to email me personally.  In this case they get the exact same level of tolerance I have for telemarketers which is less than zero.

I think especially when it comes to blogging you have to at some point draw a clear line as to what you will and will not tolerate.  Blogging is considerably different than participating in forums or newsgroups.  I feel that I do the hard work of blogging that by default I get to decide what I will or will not tolerate.  Maybe this sounds a bit selfish but I enjoy blogging so I'm not going to waste my time or efforts on a comment spammer, blog troll or someone who decides emailing their nasty comments is the way to go.  Tolerance is a wonderful quality but when it comes to blogs sometimes it needs to go out the window!

Garden Gnome
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