The person that I think it is has previously been exposed on another related blog, by me, and quite accidentally, as having two online personas. But the way they responded made me think she probably has multi-personality disorder. I mean that seriously and it’s kind of sad. Now that she (I’m pretty sure the core person is a woman) has shown herself to have so many personalities, it’s really kind of tragic.

Of course, it’s possible she’s just obsessive, or something else entirely. Luckily, her comments are pretty transparent. Even one comment I have been able to see through, although I think I may have missed one way in the past. I’ve noticed that the other blog has also stopped taking comments from her and her known personas, so they must be able to see through her too.

It’s something to think about when blogging, that people who are a little scary blog too, and come to your sites. It’s best to be on the lookout, and I think it’s best to have a no tolerance policy, that is, to not acknowledge them at all and not publish their comments for your own safety and comfort.

I have a comment stalker who is probably behind this, but I have know way of knowing for sure. The thing is, all of the comments say basically the same thing in different ways, and they all have a common aggressive tone. Having learned in the past to spot this tone, I am not approving any of them. I actually like true dissenting comments, but I know from experience approving comments with this tone doesn’t lead anywhere good.

All the commenters clearly want to rip my head off, but they’re trying their best to appear even tempered and rational. But one of the things that gives them away is their one-sidedness. They don’t address anything in my actual post. Some of them succumb to their urges by getting openly aggressive at the end, which is kind of funny. They’re like longer versions of this sentence:

Oh we’re all friends and love each other and it’s ok that you don’t like cookies… there are two sides to everything… but… WHY DON’T YOU LIKE COOKIES! TELL ME! YOU’RE A MORON! I HATE YOU!

For the record the post has nothing to do with cookies, which I actually love.

My comment stalker has this same tone, so either she has found people like her, or she is in fact posting all these comments. It’s kind of like they sent out an outline for people to follow and then they all followed the outline while purposely making the comments as diverse as possible. Anyway, it’s weird, and I think it’s kind of fascinating.

She started off being a supportive commenter, I looked forward to hearing from her. Then it got a little weird because she started commenting on every post right after I posted. Now, I’ve been a fan of blogs before and realized I was commenting too often, and held back. Once you get the first comment too often in a row, you realize it’s not healthy, no matter how friendly you are or how much you like the blog. Most of us have the ability to realize that before we’re told.

It was becoming a problem because my blog was almost becoming her blog, and she would start giving advice to and replying to the other commenters with advice I wouldn’t give. Also, commenting first all the time sort of sets the tone for the comments in general and I felt she was intimidating other readers from commenting.

One day, she commented five or six very long comments in a row on one post. It was a bit much, and I emailed her to tell her I had combined some of her comments, and that I had adopted a very sensible comment policy copied from other blog’s policies. I told her not to worry about it because I understood getting overly excited about a blog post and having a lot to say. I also explained that was what was so great about having our own blogs, is that we could post our thoughts on our blog and then link back. This would be great for her because she had a lot more than even one full blog post to say.

She was not happy. I can understand, none of us likes to be corrected like that, but honestly, at this point I was almost hoping she would take offense and never come back. She kind of told me off, which was fine, but she kept coming back and seemed to have calmed it down.

Then one day, she started a comment argument with me that totally roped me in. The problem was, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Her comments didn’t really make sense, but I though she was just being passionate. I kept commenting in ways that would give her a chance to explain what she really meant, since I thought she couldn’t possibly mean what she was actually saying. She would come back with even more ridiculous comments. Eventually, 36 comments later, she because so personally insulting that I just stopped and shut down comments. Three days later, after talking with friends about the situation, I deleted all of the comments from that post. I decided not to accept comments from her at all anymore.

Months later, I was on somebody else’s blog about the same general topic as mine and I was telling other people how I had this crazy commenter. Well guess what? This blog also had a crazy commenter with a different name. This person replied and knew exactly what had happened on my blog and tried to start that argument up again. Then I realized it was her. I apologized to the blog owner for causing this situation and said I wouldn’t comment on that post anymore, as not to continue that old debate. Then, the blog owner commented and said hello using the crazy commenter’s real name, which I hadn’t mentioned. Apparently they were also dealing with her.

Then the stalker commented in the strangest way, sort of acknowledging a sort of multiple personality disorder. Something like “I don’t know why you would refer to me as BlahBlah when I’m clearly posting as YaddaYadda.” OK, I finally realized that there was more going on here than an overly passionate or even overly aggressive person.

From then on, she has used multiple aliases to try to sneak onto my blog and other blogs. But her tone is pretty easy to spot. Today she posted a comment under a new name and had me fooled for about 10 minutes before I realized I needed to delete the comment. After she noticed the comment had been deleted, she tried commenting again using her usual insults, confirming for me that it really was her. I’m pretty sure she has other identities on my website that are “nice” and there’s no way to fight against that.

It’s kind of scary. Since I emailed her the one time, she has occasionally emailed insults to me which I never reply to and save in case for some reason I need evidence, which I hope I don’t. I’m nervous about even posting this in case she’s truly stalking me because I know she feeds off attention. But, I think it’s something more and more people are going to be dealing with. It’s new situation for me to learn to deal with.

First, I have acknowledged that she has a serious medical condition, and there can be no reasoning with her. Second, I have realized that in general, if a commenter’s comments don’t make logical sense, I won’t let them through at all. People who are willing to listen to reason, even if they disagree with you, have a whole different tone than people who just want to disrupt your blog, or are mentally impaired in some way.

Because of her, I’ve actually changed my style of commenting on blogs. It took me a while, but I learned not to argue with crazy people falsely thinking they will come to reason. I am much less likely to post a negative comment now. In fact, I’m much less likely to even post a negative post because it tends to attract the crazies more.

If you have a crazy commenter story, I’d love to hear it.

Just this morning I was thinking about how long it should take to complete a new blog entry. The actual answer depended on the kind of blog entry and on what I expected in return for creating that blog entry. What I’ve found with blogs is that you can get into a habit of posting even though your goals aren’t being met. Or you can get into a habit of spending more than your allotted time on them, usually because you haven’t thought about what that allotted time actually is.

If you generalize this to all tasks, not just blog entries, you can start to see how employees don’t often think about it. Even a higher level manager with a budget and a time limit often doesn’t think about whether that’s the right budget or the right time limit. Even executives often run on autopilot choosing the next obvious task without really thinking if it’s the right one. This is how companies go out of business, which they often do, at least the modern version of going out of business, selling or restructuring.

When you own your own business though, the metrics are always right in your face. Can you pay your rent? Are you happy with how much you’re working? Do you feel you’re getting the return on investment you desire out of your work? If not, then it’s time to start rethinking things and this can happen on a daily basis, or even more often. The questions are tough, and correct answers are required.

Employees don’t need to ask those questions because the answers for an employee are usually constant, and they can’t usually change the answers anyway, except to find another job, and even then it’s probably going to be mostly more of the same.

I love it. These challenges are what I’ve been waiting for. But I can’t help but think that most other people wouldn’t like it at all.

Thanks for the tip! I’ll probably be subscribing to your posts. Keep up the good work!

What I find hilarious is the use of the word “probably”. Like he’s still not sure, and I’ll have to prove to him that I’m worthy still. Or maybe he’s just indecisive. Maybe “probably” is his greatest compliment. Maybe he told his girlfriend he would “probably” marry her? Or maybe he told a potential employer he would “probably” take the job.

Oh boy, I sure hope he does subscribe!

Now that I think about it, probably is has almost gone out of use altogether. It’s a very weak word. If you say, “I’m thinking about buying a boat.”, most people would say that’s a good idea and good for you, or more likely, “Don’t do it!” But if you said, “I’m probably buying a boat.”, people would be very suspicious. It’s like you’re trying to get credit for buying the boat without doing it.

Never trust anyone who uses the word “probably”, unless of course they’re writing a blog post about the word “probably”.

I’ve come up with the four main kinds of AdSense ads:

1. The Honest Guy Ad

   These are purchase by small companies who have a good product that they actually want people to click on and buy. When Google places these ads on your site and the right reader comes along, it’s good very everyone involved, and you get a click. This almost never happens because these people don’t have enough money to buy enough ads to succeed.

2. The Spam Ad

   This is the most common type of ad. When you start out, you get almost all spam ads. Generally, while these ads are trying to get clicks, which is good, they don’t because they’re lame. Additionally they make your site look bad. These ads are only good for Google.

3. The Impression Ad

   Bigger companies with large budgets buy these. For instance, a dog food brand would use these. These ads aren’t attempting to get clicks, which is bad. They just want to look pretty and use your website to build brand recognition. If you have a blog about pets, for instance, almost all of your ads will impression ads. These ads are only good for Google and the advertiser.

4. The Exploitation Ad

   These are not only the worst kind of ad, they are just plain bad. These are the ads by people who believe the opposite of you, who buy ads on certain key words you use, to insert themselves in the eyes of their opposition. These are basically impression ads. These only make money for Google. But they give the advertiser what they want, visibility. Ann Coulter loves to have her picture on gay rights blogs, because she’s pure evil, and AdSense is her vehicle.

I have to:

• find the image
• upload it to my own image server
• get the url
• type the image tag
• type the style with the height and width
• type the alt text
• if it’s the image that’s used as the thumbnail, i have to get the thumnail url
• get the thumnail size
• enter custom fields for both of those

Everything but the first three can theoretically be automated. So I’ve started working on a new plugin. I just have to enter the url of the large image and the alt text, select the position and whether it’s the thumbnail or not, and the rest is taken care of. I’ve got it inserting the correct image tag with height and width styles and alt text. The rest should be easy enough.

I implemented it all based around the add_meta_box functionality of WordPress. It’s great. This is something I do for every post, it will save me so much time to be able to automate it. Especially when I’m tired. It seems like then it really takes me a long time.

I would like to get it down to basically writing and proofreading. Of course, even with this, images will add some time, but not nearly as much.

I’m not adding any images to this post. I just don’t want to do it the old way anymore.

I have been thinking lately that comments can be placed into one of three categories.

Normal

These are the comments nobody minds. They are the kinds of comments blog owners expect most of the time. They aren’t necessarily pro or con or good or bad, they just are, and they are basically uneventful.

Controversial

Controversial comments have something special about them. They take things in a different direction than the blog owner intended. They are still good comments, although they may not be well received. They express a viewpoint that has some merit. Depending on how the blogger feels they will either leave them or react to them. They often cause other commenters to either agree or disagree, or both. They are good in that they make a blog interesting. They are bad in that sometimes they take the topic away from what the owner of the blog had originally intended, and either wasn’t prepared for or just didn’t want to talk about at all.

Here is a blog post where I left a controversial comment. It’s the first comment, and it started sort of a firestorm which actually was totally unintentional. My comment had merit in the fact that many people agree with it. It was controversial in that it changed the nature of the discussion away from what the blogger had intended and potentially offended the blogger. However, the blogger joined in, so at the end of the day, it’s probably a good blog discussion in that it will be interesting to people. In all cases though, it’s the blogger who decides whether it’s normal, controversial, or destructive based on the blogger’s goals, not on the content of the comments.

Destructive

Most destructive comments are spam, or just completely unrelated to the topic. Some are insulting. But these destructive comments are the obvious ones that people just delete. Some destructive comments are otherwise acceptable but take the topic too far away from what the original post was about in a way the spoils the discussion. Sometime destructive comments are just too many or too long.

I recently had a situation on Doxie News where I posted and a very helpful regular reader just kind of temporarily lost control and posted five long comments in response. One other person posted a small to-the-point question comment, and the destructive comments both gave one potential answer to that question while also preventing further answers by having four comments after the question. Discussion over.

The commenter wasn’t trying to be destructive, it just turned out that way. I’m thinking of offering accounts so regular readers can edit their own comments for this reason.

Alternatives to Controversial Comments

I am a controversial commenter from time to time. Most of the time I don’t mean it as controversial as its interpreted. That’s due to the common problems of tone not being in text. One alternative to controversial commenting is to take control post your feelings in a blog post on your blog instead. I suggested this to the reader I mentioned, and that’s what she did and I am happy to see she remained a reader of my blog. I also did the same thing with this post on Doxie News, although I had originally commented on the other post. But when you choose to post on your blog instead of commenting you get to frame a whole separate discussion. In certain cases that’s better, and sometimes it’s not.

The other blog is a work in progress. It had an original goal that didn’t work out. I’m trying to find some guidelines for it, but it’s kind of up in the air right now. But it will have a purpose, it will just be a little more… creative.

I did something interesting the other day in Photoshop. I had a picture with multiple dogs, and you know how they are with red eye. Some of them I just painted, but others I cloned eyes from some dogs onto other dogs. It works really well. Unless you know what the dogs look like normally, the there’s obviously something different.

RSS is a very important part of blog culture, and I think more people need to know about it. It’s made my life better, and I can see people liking it.

Being fairly new, Designoplasty doesn’t have very many readers yet, but if you are here, and you have a blog, leave a comment telling me what you do, if anything, to promote RSS to your readers.

• Posts with n pictures of a certain theme. Red, Sky, Blue, Street, Grass. Who cares? Oh 25 pictures of grass. I’m so inspired, your blog is well worth reading.
• Post with n wordpress themes. And none of them are that special and they are all other design blogs. It seems like they are all just recycling the same material.
• Posts with n anything: brushes, backgrounds, fonts, textures. These posts don’t actually explore any topic, or make any statements. They’re just lists.

Oops, I guess that was a list!

But what’s more infuriating than that, is the comments for these post. They are so sickeningly sweet they have to be fake, “Oh I’m so inspired now.” or, “Thank you so much for posting these.” Well that’s about it for the comments’ sentiments, but it’s just repeated 20 times.

I know why they do it, these type of posts get dugg. And I imagine the comments are probably fake or maybe I have a lot to learn about blogging. Maybe people really are desperately thankful for a list of twenty pictures of “blue.”

This blog is not going to be like that. Even if the posts only have meaning to me, they will have meaning. And if they are nonsense, they will be honest nonsense. Even if this blog doesn’t make thirty cents from adsense, it will be real. Hopefully interesting too, but real.

To all the real designers out there trying to do something truly new, good luck to you. I hope I read your blog post about the next one thing that’s truly distinctive that you do.

What’s best is that if you have some html you type into your posts often you can totally automate that. It’s going to save me a ton of time.