For Bloggers: A Short And Sweet Guide To Saving Yourself Trouble

Here are a few tips that will help make life easier for bloggers over the long run:

1) If you have a comments section, make sure people have to register to use it and run it with an iron fist. If you don’t keep on top of your comments section, it can be turned into a cesspool in a hurry and you’ll be blamed for it.

2) If you ban someone from commenting on your blog, don’t turn him/her back on, don’t respond to his emails, and don’t acknowledge the fact that he’s been banned on your blog. I say that because I’ve found that many of the people who get out of control in the comments section simply enjoy being annoying and causing problems. In other words, as odd as this may sound to well-adjusted people, they enjoy any sort of attention, even negative attention, and giving it to them only encourages them to hang around.

3) Don’t ever tell your readers where you work. If you do, don’t be surprised if some angry wacko gets in touch with your boss at some point and accuses you of God knows what.

4) Don’t send out emails from your work address or post in another blog’s comment section from work. A work address tells people where you work right off. An IP address, which the administrator of the comments section can see, can be run through Arin and may tell them the same thing.

5) Have an unregistered phone number and don’t mention where you live unless it’s a large area. It helps keep the crazies away.

6) Don’t post other people’s email addresses or phone numbers on your blog and ask your readers to contact them because if your readers do something loopy, you’ll be blamed. Instead, link to the contact information. That way, if there are any problems, it makes it harder to tie them back to you.

7) Don’t post the email addresses or IPs of people who send hate mail to you. That’s not to spare them trouble, it’s to spare you trouble if one of your readers sends them objectionable emails or tries to launch some sort of attack at their IP.

8) If a small blog says something nasty about you, don’t get all upset and think you have to respond to them. As often as not, by hammering them, you’re just sending traffic their way and getting people interested in what they have to say. Nobody may pay much attention to a tiny blogger saying bad things about you, but lots of people will tune in for a “blog feud.”

9) Don’t write about anything on your blog that you couldn’t deal with people in the “real world” finding out about because eventually, one way or the other, it will probably come to light.

10) Once a post is published and other bloggers run across it, you’re going to have to live with the consequences. So, don’t blog angry. If you do write a post while you’re angry, wait until you cool off, and then go back and edit it to make it less scathing.

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