Comment Policy

Since it seems I need one, here is the official comment policy:

1. In general, I welcome and encourage all comments. However, there are a few caveats.
2. First time comments are held in moderation, until they can be manually approved. If a commenter has a previously approved comment, future comments are automatically approved. However, at times when I’m dealing with a high number of potentially contentious comments, every comment will be held in moderation.
3. If your comment is not approved at once, please be patient. I’m a busy person and don’t always get around to approving comments right away.
4. Sometimes, a legitimate comment lands in the spam folder. It happens. Again, please be patient and I’ll approve it.
5. You will be asked to enter a name (need not be your legal name) and e-mail address, when leaving a comment, and the system will also collect your IP address. This data is collected for security purposes and in order to allow you to subscribe to comment threads. I will not use this data for any other purposes, such as spamming you. For more information, please refer to the privacy policy.
6. Comments in English and German are welcome. Comments in other languages are not necessarily unwelcome, however, I probably won’t be able to read them.
7. In general, I welcome a wide variety of opinions and I don’t blanket-ban commenters. However, this is my private blog and not a zone of unlimited free speech. This means that comments that are a) spam, b) offensive and inflammatory and c) intended to provoke flamewars with other commenters will not be approved. This does not happen very often, but sometimes it does.
8. Disagreements with other commenters or myself are fine, but I don’t want any flamewars on this blog. If you have a vehement disagreement with another commenter, please take it elsewhere.
9. I reserve the right to disable comments on certain posts, usually on subjects that tend to attract abusive comments and flamewars.
10. I reserve the right to edit comments, if necessary. Mostly, this involves removing potentially problematic or spammy links.
11. The fact that no commenter has been blanket-banned yet doesn’t mean it will never happen.
12. If you behave like a reasonable human being, we’ll get along just fine.