Comment Section Trolls

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

Blogs have comment sections. Well, most of them do. This blog has always allowed comments, but that process has changed a few times over the years and with that there are some stories to share.

Originally you could comment and hit "enter" and your comment was there immediately. Anyone could comment at anytime. There weren't "bots", spam comment machines, or the like. But people were, and still can be, troll-ish and mean. The comment section here was proof of this. 

Around late 2006 or sometime during 2007, (sorry! I cannot remember when this was!), I ran into an alarming situation that required me to make a big change to how the comments worked here. It had to do with what was then the new 650B/27.5"er MTB wheels which Kirk Pacenti was championing. I'm not sure which post of mine set off the things that forced me to change the comment section, but it very well may have been THIS POST from late 2007. At any rate, I was alerted to an issue in my comments section via email and when I checked it out, alarms went off in my mind. 

A colorized scan of the OG G-Ted logo drawn in the early 2000's.

There were pages of comments. Derogatory, defaming comments about myself and my take on 650B wheels. Apparently some ill-willed fans of the wheel size hatched a plan on mtbr.com's 650B forums and hit my blog repeatedly all day long with comments. 

This forced me to delete the entire comments section going back to the beginnings of the blog. There was no other way to do the work effectively otherwise. Then I installed a new comments section that required moderation. 

It was kind of a bummer because there were a lot of gems in the comment section back then from a lot of folks who also blogged in the cycling sphere and from folks I miss like Joel Dyke and others from the early Trans Iowa days. But trolls often ruin things and you should never read the comments sections anyway, right?

There was one other time when Google bought out Blogger and I had to flush the old comments out and start all over again with another version of the comments feature. Since then things have stabilized. But what do you expect after almost 20 years of blogging? Things happen. 

It has been really good ever since then as far as the comments go and I appreciate everyone that has taken the opportunity to comment and I have tried to keep things decent and have discussions here that acknowledge other's points of view. I have had a few times where I had to shut down a person because they were just being inflammatory and not adding to the discussion, but that is quite rare here these days.

Thanks for engaging here, if you do use this feature to communicate with me. I truly appreciate that you do comment and especially if you are a regular reader here.