Could I throw in my two-cents worth?

A word from our sponsor:

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I know that a lot of people are upset about nasty comments or things that take place that they regard as 'not right'.

For things that folks do not like, this is not a subscription site and everything is paid for out of our goodwill. I'm sorry to say to those people, but you should just accept it if you do not like it. Any advertising that is present is intended to bring in revenue for the site.

There are always going to be people who gripe about the subject of a particular story or how it was handled. If you were paying a monthly subscription fee, MAYBE you would have a right to expect that stories would be free of spelling errors and have better punctuation. As far as I know, there are only a few writers here who get paid for their work and I am sure that their stories are better in quality.

I mean no disrespect to anyone here, but we all need to have a little thicker skin. Do not let the negativity in story comments bother you so much. Look at it this way, at least they are reading your stories. I have never asked to have a comment removed from one of my stories, but I assume that is an option and we just have to communicate with Erin.

Maybe one of the things that would help writers is to remind them at the time they post a story that inappropriate comments can be removed.

Erin: Is it possible to add a message on the story submission page that would tell an author that inappropriate comments are not allowed and that they should communicate with you about them? It will not get rid of the emotional impact of the initial comment, but it would be a little more gratifying to know that the jerk who posted the message or comment would not have much of an audience.

I think that we are letting emotions run too high on this subject and we should resort to laughing at the people who think that they are entitled to complain, hack, and slash at our stories. That privilege is reserved for our editors and we should not give the bad actors the satisfaction of hurting us.

Comments

I Did Once

Daphne Xu's picture

I once did ask for a comment to a story of mine, to be removed. It was an advertising comment, having nothing whatsoever to do with the story. I don't think I've ever actually asked for a negative comment to be removed. At least, I hope that I didn't.

And, I'm sorry to say, I've made overly negative comments myself. I try to restrain myself. This would be a good time to apologize to any recipient of such comments. Sorry...

-- Daphne Xu

-- Try saying freefloating three times rapidly.