Why can’t people just blog nicely? I don’t know where to start with this. In the last couple of weeks the authors of a few of the blogs that I have been reading have been upset or verbally attacked in posts and comments.

The first was at the end of July when Marzie at Mariuca – Wishing On A Falling Star was belittled for her success at becoming a very popular blog by someone not as successful. His comments were just plain rude. One comment he made was that in a particular 7 day period there were no new posts. Big deal, maybe she has a life outside of the internet and had other priorities those days.

Earlier this week, Becky from Just a Girl In Short Shorts Talking About Whatever had a particularly nasty episode with another blogger who on Monday proceeded to list all the reasons why her blog was so bad, he didn’t want his site linked to from it. This has very quickly got extremely nasty with comments being posted in blogs and on blog communities. I’m not sure if, as Becky says, this guy is evil and a woman hater. After checking out his blog, my personal opinion was that his post on Monday was totally unnecessary and rude. I don’t know what communication was made asking for the link to be removed, I’m guessing it was as offensive. If you don’t like someones blog, just stop visiting. I can see why if it was a particularly offensive site you might want a link removed, Becky’s site isn’t that, well at least not to me. During the posts relating to this, Becky linked to an earlier post that she had written about Mia Zapata who was raped and murdered in 1993. I think the point that Becky is making is that people and specifically women need to learn to fight back and not get verbally or physically abused.

On Friday Polliwog, a friend of Becky, at Polliwog’s Pond posted about the problems with the same blogger. A couple of days ago he had threatening comments left in her MyBlogLog profile by the same blogger as was being abusive to Becky. As fast as she deleted the comments he left another. Polli had not even commented on this until this started, so the attack on her was totally unjust.

So, taken from what I found on Becky’s site and in the comments, this guy seems just rude, but after reading Polli’s post, it looks like Becky’s description of woman hater may turn out to have grounds I don’t normally make these sort of comments, but this time I just needed to rant.

Another type of inhabitant of blog comments is the ‘troll‘. You can recognise them by their comments, they are the one who will always post the argumentative comments designed to get a reaction from others. Usually, if it is a subject that people feel strongly about themselves, they will react quickly and defend their point. This suits the troll, who’s only goal is the infuriate the prey. All they are after is attention, so ‘Don’t Feed The Troll’