Writing Tips : Dealing with comments and criticism.

writing

The way you handle comments, especially criticism, says a lot about you as a person. There have been times in the past when I’ve said something stupid, then got into a comment fight trying to defend my stance, even though I knew I was fighting a losing battle. In some cases this is about territorial pissing, wanting to protect your own space. In other cases, it’s just not wanting to admit you’re wrong because you think it makes you look weak or stupid. In almost all cases, a quick admission of your mistake and a shout out to the person who corrected helped you will be gone and forgotten in a few seconds. A hum-dinger of an argument can drag on for weeks.

So my number one tip would be, admit your mistakes and try to correct them ASAP. You don’t want incorrect information on your site and you certainly don’t need a war on your hands.

This was my response to a thread on the OakTable list about 18 months ago.

I‘ve said stupid stuff on the internet so many times I‘ve lost track. As long as someone puts you straight and you accept it and move on don’t have any problem with it. It’s hard not to launch into the “post mistake excuses and damage limitation”. Been there. Done that. Made myself look even more stupid and then bought the t-shirt. My stock response is now, “Your correct. Im a dick. Thanks…”

At which point Jonathan Lewis posted this.

your“/. “you’re”

The mistakes people make !

It’s just perfect! Still makes me LOL when I think about it. 🙂

Sometimes people level unfair criticism at you. I get this a lot. People write to me saying something like, “I followed your instructions and they are completely wrong!” On further examination, you realise they are trying to use your Oracle 10g installation for RHEL guide to install Oracle 12c on Fedora and then they have the nerve to complain when things don’t go to plan. In these cases, it’s really tempting to go Guns of the Navarone on their ass, but you’ve got to try and take the higher ground. You have to educate them.

You will definitely get a lot of spam comments. Some of this can be controlled with plugins, like Akismet, but some of it you can’t. It’s worth spending your time cleaning up the spam, but there are some comments that are a judgement call. Some people are so desperate to advertise their own articles they will comment on everything they see and put a link to their own articles, even though they don’t add any more value. My site is for me, not an advertising platform for others. If someone posts a comment that links to another article, I read the article and make a decision if the comment is worthwhile to myself and other readers, or just link spam. If I think it is the latter, it gets deleted. You will have to decide how you deal with this sort of thing yourself.

You might want to consider locking the comments on older posts. WordPress allows you to do this. A little while back I switched on this feature and locked comment for anything older than 30 days. The amount of spam I received dropped massively. I guess it’s a bit annoying for someone who finds the post somewhere down the line, but you have to protect your own time or you will become a slave to housekeeping and you will quit.

Check out the rest of the series here.

Cheers

Tim…