State of the Blog: Comments and Flamethrowers

Hey, everyone! I hope everyone is doing well after the short forced blog break that happened on the 14th!

As a quick recap, the blog experienced a critical error on the 14th and was unable to be accessed by anyone, including the mods. We’re not exactly sure what caused it, but the most likely candidate is a malfunctioning plugin that was later fixed by its developers or WordPress itself. It seems like everything should be alright again 🙂

Onto the main topics of this post, which, sadly, are not as rejoiceful as the return of the blog. This post is going to be pretty long but it is very important, so please try to read through the entire thing!

Comments, and comments, and… comments? Oh my.

As everyone knows, comments make up the backbone of the blog. After all, it wouldn’t be what it is without you all! Throughout the years, we’ve had so many BlogClanners leave their mark on the blog through their comments, culminating in over 1.6 million comments and 11 (now 12) entire Taverns! That is a lot!

But that second number made BlogTeam think: we’re already on the twelfth tavern? Didn’t we just make Tavern 11 earlier this year? How did we already reach over a thousand pages on it?

And so, we went looking. Sure, Tavern 10 also has over a thousand pages, but it was made last year. Tavern 10 was made in February 2022, has 110k comments, and has 1455 pages of comments. Meanwhile, Tavern 11 was only made in April 2023, has 68k comments, and has 1188 pages of comments. It’s been a year and a half since Tavern 10 was made, and in less than half a year, Tavern 11 was just a few hundred pages away from surpassing its predecessor despite having far fewer comments.

That left us wondering again: How on earth did this happen?

Being the ones to approve comments affords mods a unique perspective on the blog. It lets us see different trends that happen on the blog, and not the kind of trends you’re thinking about! Over the years, we were able to watch the evolution of display names changing from simple warrior and tribe names to display names that list preferred pronouns and include at least 4 emojis. We were able to see the absolute explosion of a phenomenon that’s called blog families. We were lamenting in real time at the downward spiral of longer and longer comments (I’m looking at you, fanfics!) before we herded them into a more manageable form. So we sat down and thought about it. What part of the blog’s commenting culture had changed?

And when we really thought about it, the answer came easily: For one reason or another, BlogClan comments had become more and more spammy.

Now, if you’re on the older side of the blog’s members or are a frequent victim of the spam filter on the blog, you might be a little bit confused because of what spam comments or spam emails tend to look like. Usually, they’re comments made by bots, fervently and unrelentingly promoting a link or something similar. Aside from fanfic or roleplay ads, BlogClan comments don’t tend to look like those, and you would be right. In terms of that kind of spam, BlogClan isn’t very spammy.

But if you take the other definition of spam, which (in a very broad sense) is doing the same thing over and over again in a short period of time, then we start to get a little bit closer to what’s happening on the blog. When we mods talk about spammy comments, we include this definition as well as the advertisement one.

What BlogTeam was seeing was that people would make individual, typically very short comments in a short period of time. One person would make two separate comments that would contain a single line, possibly even related to each other (ex: “I’m at school!” and “This class is so boring…”), but post them mere minutes apart from each other. If it was just one person doing it, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference, but five? Ten? Fifteen or more people who are all active members? Even if they only do it once a day, those comments pile up fast and make the pages turn even faster. It also wasn’t just limited to the Tavern, because we were also seeing it on the Polls page where multiple questions would be posted in their own comment when there is more than enough room to put them all in the same comment.

Another thing we noticed was the Recent Purrs. There’s always been something really exciting about appearing on the Recent Purrs list! But when people make individual comments just for the sake of trying to have “substantial”/non-spammy comments so they can legitimately conquer the Recent Purrs? Suddenly, those comments look a lot more like spam. Similarly, sometimes there’s something funny about the current Purrs list and people want to share it because other people are going to find it funny too, but that tends to lead to three or more people all making individual comments about the same thing, which is just the same Recent Purrs, and that also starts to look a lot more like spam.

So, BlogClan’s comments are spammy now. What should we do about it if we want to make Tavern 12 last? Well, the quick and dirty method would be to just tell you guys to comment less, but that’s a poorly-applied bandage, not a solution. What we need to do is steer the commenting culture back in the other direction, and BlogTeam can’t do that entirely alone.

For the immediate future, BlogTeam’s going to keep an eye on Tavern comments and edit some of them to be in one comment instead of several individual comments. These comments may not even be that closely related like the school-related example written earlier. You might have seen this happen a couple of times already if you’re a keen-eyed commenter with a good memory of your own comments. Ultimately, though, it’s up to you, the backbone of the blog, to help drive this change and make our new Tavern last 🙂

BlogClan is a chatting place, but it’s not an instant messaging service or a platform that’s all about updating others on what you’re doing or thinking about at a given moment. We have the room for more in-depth comments, comments that are longer than a single sentence, and in-depth comments prompt in-depth replies. That’s how you build a conversation, rather than just a status update and a reaction to the update. When you’re commenting, take a minute to slow down and look at everyone else – what conversation can you join today? We’d love to find out 🙂

Now onto the second part of what BlogTeam wants to address.

There’s a firm line between reality and fiction…

…or at least, there should be. This part is a bit more serious than spammy comments. We want to preface this part by saying that none of this is about a specific person. It is not anyone’s fault, and if there are people to blame, then BlogTeam is at fault as well for only now directly addressing it.

As mentioned before, BlogTeam gets to see the trends and evolution path that BlogClan’s commenting culture takes. One obvious trend that was left out was humour. Over the past couple of years, there’s been one specific category of joke that’s become increasingly popular as well as increasingly out of control. You know it, I know it, and the flamethrower definitely knows it: arson.

It seems like not a day goes by without there being at least one arson joke on the blog somewhere, and that’s not including anyone who mentions arson in their display name. Normally, BlogTeam doesn’t pay too much attention to jokes, since BlogClanners typically know what is and isn’t a joke when reading other people’s comments. However, we were noticing something that was concerning about the arson jokes. They were escalating to an uncomfortable degree.

So, to make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s go over what arson actually is. The exact legal definition may change a bit depending on where you live, but generally, arson is the crime of willfully and purposefully setting fire to property, which can include buildings, vehicles, and forests. That’s right, it is specifically a criminal act and typically is considered a felony, which is a highly serious crime. Simply setting a fire doesn’t necessarily make it arson and most arson cases are not caused by pyromaniacs (people who repeatedly fail to resist sudden impulses to deliberately set fires).

We went over the definition of arson to highlight what it means in the real world. Of course, it’s almost a given fact that nobody on the blog who makes jokes about arson will actually go out into the real world and do an act of arson. No matter how much we joke about it, we know that it isn’t something we should actually do. So, if we know what arson means and we know that we’re not going to do it, what exactly is the problem?

A couple of years ago, “arson” was really just a meme word on the blog. It was used very vaguely, pretty sparingly, and almost exclusively for inconsequential things. Nowadays, arson jokes have become incredibly frequent, descriptive, and much more realistic. Where we would once see jokes about setting fire to a test that didn’t go so well or to a piece of art someone did years ago that they don’t like anymore, we now see detailed jokes about setting a house – or worse, a person – on fire.

The jokes about arson have become commonplace on the blog, and the carelessness of the descriptive jokes is dismissive of the real-life harm that arson can have. This has made multiple people very uncomfortable, especially those who have been or know people who have been negatively affected by fire or an act of arson, and addressing that is something that’s long overdue.

This isn’t BlogTeam saying that all arson jokes are no longer allowed. We don’t want to dissuade BlogClanners from having a bit of fun with each other, but we all must be more conscious of what we post. The lighter jokes about arson aren’t necessarily what needs to stop – we all understand not wanting to see something, like a homework assignment that’s troubling you, and that joking about using fire to destroy it is just a light-hearted way of expressing that we’d rather not have to do our work. It’s the jokes that are descriptive and that are getting closer and closer to real life that shouldn’t be made.

While it’s not going to be a strict rule or ban, BlogTeam is going to keep a closer eye on any arson jokes and edit down or delete the extreme jokes that we feel are far too descriptive. As a rule of thumb, don’t make any jokes that describe or depict arson in a way that it could occur in real life, nor any jokes that could be linked to current or recent real-life events out of respect and understanding for the effects those events had on people’s lives.

The wrap-up, at last.

If there’s anything to take away from this post today, it’s that we all need to be more conscious of what we post. Don’t let this dissuade you from commenting! As said before, we love the blog and the blog is nothing without its community, but in order for this community to keep being the comfortable space it’s been for the past 15 years, a couple things will have to change to let us make it to 20 years.

Thank you for reading through this post, dear BlogClanner. Happy chatting!