That’s my number one rule for comments, borrowed from my good friend Wil Wheaton. (And by “good friend,” I mean “celebrity whom I’ve never met and who doesn’t know I exist.” Just in case that wasn’t clear.) We don’t always have to agree, but we do have to get along; any kind of dick-ish behavior will be deleted.
That said, I also don’t appreciate comments left with the primary purpose of bringing traffic back to your own blog. Yes, we’re all in the self-promotion business to an extent. But your name is already a link back; there’s usually no reason to leave another. WordPress recently ran a couple posts that I wholeheartedly agree with on when it’s appropriate to leave a link and when you’re just making a bad impression.
I’ve recently come up with a fun way to deal with the more extreme cases:
For those comments that don’t even address the post I’ve written (“Great post! now-visit-my-blog.com“) I will add this Shameless Plug Award, as well as change the URL to direct to something completely different.
Of course, most people who do this probably won’t check my comment policy first… but that just makes it more fun for the rest of us!
(Idea for granting awards to comments courtesy of Insatiable Booksluts.)
Cheap Thrills 