Beyond Criticism – When It’s Time To Pull The Plug
April 21, 2008
Do you receive hate mail? Do you get vile comments on your blog? If so, you’re not alone, but don’t worry, there’s simple and effective ways to deal with the offenders:
The Gramatically Correct: These people often show up on the comment sections of popular blogs and point out minor errors. And their comments range from annoying to plain rude.
Whilst most of us strive to avoid making typos or grammatical errors on our blogs, often the odd one will slip through. Most of us don’t spend our entire day writing blog posts, so speed is essential.
And we don’t need some anal retentive tw.t pointing out our mistakes. So if it happens to you, I recommend deleting the offending comment and correcting the error immediately.
The Vile Critic: Few of us expect the world to agree with every single word we write. But some blog commentors choose to go beyond what I would call constructive criticism.
If they don’t like what you’ve written, some people will resort to attacking you personally. And others will go as far as to give graphic descriptions of what they’d like to see happen to you – and believe me, there are some sick minded people on the Internet.
I’ve had these types of comments on here recently. I usually delete them and ban the offender. And I’ve found that it’s best not to reply to them either.
Whilst some of these are what I would describe as threatening, I would never allow these types to intimidate me and you shouldn’t either. Remember that anyone who attacks you anonymously is a coward anyway.
The Legal Challenger: If you write about people and companies who have seriously pissed you off, then sooner or later, someone may threaten to sue you.
And, if every single word you wrote about them was true, you should just ignore them. One of the main reasons the Internet it so popular is that it discourages censorship, so don’t be bullied into deleting your words by someone who dislikes something you’ve written.
If you’re still worried, bear the following points in mind:
1) You can only sue someone for libel if they’ve written something untrue and it is something which could defame their character. 2) It is hugely expensive to sue someone for libel, so unless your accuser is extremely rich, their threats are probably empty. 3) If they do try to sue, they have to prove what you wrote about them is untrue and show evidence that they have suffered as a consequence.
* If you don’t live in the UK, you may want to read up on libel laws for your own country.
Have you received comments that go beyond reasonable criticism on your own blog? What did you do?
Comments
11 Responses to “Beyond Criticism – When It’s Time To Pull The Plug”
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Successful And Outstanding Blogger
Another point to bear in mind Cath. I believe I’m right in saying you can’t be sued by somebody if it was plainly obvious you weren’t being serious, which is why satirical tv programmes can get away with all sorts of stuff.
BTW, when I sent my book out for people to review I did so with a comment to ignore the grammatical errors and typos, I was only interested in knowing if they valued the content. At least half still couldn’t resist telling me there were grammatical errors and typos. Muppets!
Tim Brownson’s last blog post..I Know You Better Than You Think
All of the things you talk about are symptomatic of jealousy.
Welcome back by the way.
If you have good morals and business ethics. Or act fairly, then there are enough people in the world who bravely sit on the sidelines judging you.
People who do well unfortunately attract people who have failed themselves, and feel they are validating their own poor results by wasting their own time finding chinks in your armour.
I am currently waiting for a solicitors letter from a former client who threatened me. He was essentially a bully.
And he didn’t like the fact that we simply ended his agreement when he cleverly evaded paying for 6 months of support we had supplied. What we could sue him for we did. He paid up instead of going to court.
The support he had had we simply forgot about and wrote off.
He didn’t like that. Because we had ended the game and took away his power, he suddenly re-appeared recently demanding an explanation as to why we had changed his passwords and demanding to know what the new ones were.
And as a parting shot to his rant claimed that he had found a new support company who were 33% cheaper.
I don’t care how believes me, but we’ve got better things to do than change a loser’s passwords.
He’s threatended to sue unless we supply the passwords. My response? Go ahead!
Mainly because I’d be fascinated to see the solicitor who would take on such a case! How on earth can they sue us for something we haven’t done? The evidence will be fascinating to see.
But then again, bullies don’t usually follow through with their threats.
There are some bad eggs in this world. We are supposed to value clients. And 99% of them we do. The bad eggs need to go someplace else to spread their vileness.
Ian Denny’s last blog post..New, Aspiring, Failed Or Successful Businesses – Share Your Business Story -
I’ve occasionally got personal attacks on this and other blogs. If it’s bad, I’ll block the commentator and possibly delete.
I had someone recently who attacked me for giving what she believed was illegal advice (it became clear that she’d only read the article) and lectured me about not writing about stuff I don’t know (ironic because according to her site she’s a biochemist, not a lawyer). Anyway I let her comment stay because it brought out some good discussion in the comments section. But I had to preface it with my own comment about that particular comment because I thought her advice was so completely off-base that I didn’t want it to worry people…she seemed not to grasp the concept that an abused woman wouldn’t always have easy access to her accounts.
I also get people who simply disagree, and there I just either let it go completely or I respond…depending on how much time I have and how much I think it even needs a response. Sometimes it’s just two different points of view.
I’m sorry you’ve been having those kind of comments Cath. I’m glad you’re still with us though – for one horrible moment I thought you were pulling the plug on yourself!
Hope all is well
Joanna
Joanna Young’s last blog post..3 Keys to Powerful Writing: Guest Post By Robert Hruzek
So far I’ve been lucky, but I’m biding my time. I don’t get too worked up about those that like to threaten suit. Perhaps it’s because I’ve worked in the legal field too long and am married to an attorney to get too impressed when someone threatens to sick their attorney on me. Actually I was sued once in a previous job, I was right, he was wrong. It was a frivilous suit and it was thrown out. He was an idiot.
Debbie Yost’s last blog post..Happy Pills
Hi Catherine,
You’ve been missed. Glad to see you back.
I’ve been lucky so far. Just a couple of negative remarks.
I do believe everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I am the author/owner of my blog so it’s my decision whether to let them stay or mark them as spam.
Barbara Swafford’s last blog post..Blogging – Year One – Lesson Five
@ Tim – I’m guessing you might be right about the satirical stuff, as I think I annoyed a few people when I wrote this but nobody sued me: http://cathlawson.com/blog/2008/01/06/the-10-commandments-of-a-genius-franchisor/
I got your copy of your book to review, but didn’t have internet access while I was away so will get back to you v soon and promise no comments re typos etc.
@ Ian – your former client sounds like a right prat. I wouldn’t worry too much. When I decided to pack in my first website, someone threatened to sue me for not sending them a free newsletter!
@ MM – That woman sounds like a real nut. I’d love to know what she means by illegal advice (will have to look for the post).
@ Joanna – no way I would do that. I’m ok thank you. Just couldn’t tell anyone I had no access to internet because of spam from the SU weirdos and that illiterate stalker!
@ Debbie – Didn’t you write something about that? I’ve noticed that in America people threaten to sue for the slightest thing and now we have all these no win no fee people, the UK seems to be going the same way. It’s ridiculous.
@ Barbara – thank you. I know you’ve advised me to remove negative comments a few times now and looking back, I should have deleted some of them straight away.
One of my pet peeves is people who use comments for what would better be private conversation.
I recently had a company ask to advertise on my blog, via a blog comment. Were they too lazy to use the contact form? Why should I trust my site to ads from someone like that?
A friend recently had someone complain about a minor css problem on her site. Fine, except that complaint was made via a public comment on a third party’s site. Why not show the respect of communicating directly, privately?
I don’t get it.
Treating online communication like it impacts real people involves extra effort, but it is a very worthwhile effort.
Elizabeth Able’s last blog post..Cre8Green: Small Steps for Big Causes
Hi Elizabeth. I hope you put them in the spam folder.
One of the worst examples of those type of comments – and I’ve seen this a few times – are the ones where they ask if they can use a whole article that someone has written on their own site.
Those people are so stupid. Why should you waste your time writing something, so they can copy and paste it to stick on their spammy adsense site? Unbelievable.
I had the Grammar and Typo gods for a while.
I drove them away by politely saying thanks you and correcting (or not).
They got bored after a while and started playing somewhere else
I’ve been spared the vile ones, thank goodness, that sounds pretty sick
Jealousy at its best
Hi Nicole – Most of the vile ones were from those folks who like to thumb everything down on StumbleUpon cos I blogged about them. I don’t know if there’s really that many vile people on SU, or if it’s just one person using different profiles.