There has been a lot of talk lately about a Blogger’s Code of Conduct, and if you haven’t been hearing it, you might want to hunt around and look, because some of the conversations about it are actually fairly interesting. I’m not going to recap the whole thing, because I’ll get it all wrong and all, but the thing that seemed potentially useful to me was the institution of a standard set of badges (or buttons, or whatever they are called) that would easily and clearly indicate what a particular blog’s policies are. There would be a limited number of those, so each blogger who wanted to use the system would probably need to adjust his or her policies to match one of the badges, which (in YHB’s opinion) wouldn’t be a bad thing.\n
That’s all unclear. Let me attempt to explain by example. This Tohu Bohu has a (n unwritten) policy that I will not delete any comment of substance based on its content, but I will attempt to delete or filter any spam comments. I curse, not as much as some, but freely, and I have no objection to any Gentle Readers cursing in the comments. I am most interested<\/I> in substantial argument (even about rhetoric), but I occasionally give in to the urge to make cheap shots, and I have no objection to Gentle Readers making cheap shots in the comments, although of course y’all are Better Than That. I have never had to deal with personal attacks on this site; I suspect that if I do have to deal with them, I will resort to disemvowelling rather than deletion. That’s a very vague and bullshitty policy. I see no reason why there should be a badge for that one. But if there were a badge that said “This blog follows the same policy as Making Light”, then I would probably adopt that policy and put up the badge. That is, if there were some pressure to have a badge of some kind.\n
And I think there should be. I think it makes it much easier for a websurfer if, upon landing at a blog, there’s a quick way to know if the comments are unmoderated, community moderated, held for administrator moderation, limited to registered users, disemvowelled, unfettered, or whatnot. Sure, and there’s no way to know that the policy is actually followed (although it might be, in some sense, ideal to have a (for instance) Making Light badge be endorsed<\/I> by the Making Light folk, with such endorsement subject to removal, but even if it were set up to thwart counterfeiting, I can’t imagine them wanting to bother with checking up on their stuff). But it would be something. Similarly, a badge indicating “I say fuck<\/I> now and then, but I care about racism and sexism and attempt to avoid making racist and sexist scare-quote jokes end-scare-quote” would be helpful. To potential readers, I mean, not to me.\n
In short, the thing I find interesting is the attempt to make some sort of standardized signposts to help weary travelers find their way to places they feel welcome, and warn them from the biker bars of Blogovia. The signs. The signage. The signification. Such signs are not, as we all know, equivalent to the thing being signified, but that doesn’t mean they are without meaning. They point, they advise. And the move to come up with a handful of standard signs could be tremendously useful, not only because the standard signs would point more clearly to their intent, but because the lack<\/I> of standard signs would be highly significant in itself. If you have come to expect a “civil discourse” badge, or an “anything goes” badge, or a “beware the disemvoweller” badge, or whatever badge the blogger or bloggers have picked, and you see no badge at all, that tells you a good deal about the relationship of that blog to the community.\n