St. Louis Bloggers Guild

When Kurt Greenbaum posed, “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten” to his blog readers on November 13, he had no idea of the flurry and furry that would ensue days later.

A commenter posted a response that was deleted. Twice. Kurt passed along the IP address to the school who owned the address. A man was found, confronted and resigned.

And ever since, the internet has been immersed in a lively debate over just who the “victim” is in this case.

 Bottom line? Most bloggers, at some point or another, receive comments that are inappropriate or mean-spirited. Whether moderating comments,  blocking IP addresses or confronting the commentor, bloggers do have options in how they respond.

Some bloggers treat disparaging comments with a sense of humor.

“I celebrated it!” jokes Patrick who posted the comment as well as his retort.

But there are times, a blogger can’t easily “laugh off” a  comment. Like when the commentor’s attack involves the writer’s children. St. Louis Bloggers Guild member Michelle recounts her story: “I had a situation on my old personal blog about a year ago when a man was attacking me and my daughter (I use comment moderation, so the comments weren’t posted). When I checked his IP address, it lead back to the Defense Mapping Agency and then I knew who the man was. He has a serious security clearance at work. But he’s using his work computer at a DOD agency to leave obnoxious comments on my blog.”

What did she do?

“Instead of contacting his employer (which I didn’t do because I didn’t want him to lose his job), I wrote this post. He shut up immediately.” (The post can be found here.)

Guild Editor Kelli also ultimately tracked down a commentor due to an unsettling incident a couple of months ago where she was verbally attacked repeatedly by an angry commenter. 

“I discussed a political issue and had a crazy person leave close to 30 comments calling me everything from a lunatic to a communist (nice).  At first I deleted his comments, but he began to dig himself into such a hole that I just let it play out as other commentors were pretty much taking him down,” she says. “But when he suggested he found my blog while out looking for something rather disgusting, I decided I had enough.”

Kelli had a friend who was able to track the man down.

“All it took was the threat of calling his employer to get him to change his game and suddenly decide he actually agreed with my political stance.  Once his anonymity was gone, he had no more fight.”

Guild Founder Dana has had to deal with these sorts of comments on a regular basis, being that she’s in the public eye. But when she felt the safety of her family may be compromised? She did take action.

“I had a woman send me an email threatening my kids (I published it online) saying that she hopes “something bad happens to them.” It wasn’t really different from other threats I’d been receiving at the time.”

The difference, according to Dana, was that the woman’s email address was listed as coming from a school district in Texas.

“She used her work email and even her work email’s signature. I forwarded it to both the authorities. The school board then followed up with the principal, who conducted an internal investigation. The woman works/ed in a school and was threatening a stranger’s kids? Her bad.”

The incident has been since been “put to bed.” Dana is confident in how she handled the situation.

“Was I wrong for going to her employers? No. She made a credible threat and she was stupid enough to have done it on her boss’s dime.”

Have you had inappropriate or hateful comments? How have you responded?