Some of you are on thin ice...

In many ways, JoeUser is an experiement. It is the only blog site on the Internet that combines the strengths of all the individual bloggers together. When you make a post or comment on someone blog, it is distributed across the thousands of blogs here on this site. And, because JoeUser.com is so popular, your article is likely to get picked up on search engines.

Which, needless to say, creates a temptation for abuse. People who intentionally try to humiliate others by taking advantage of these features.  After some discussion internally, we've decided how we're going to react to this.

1) You may NOT create attack articles about other individuals on this site with your blog site using the person's name or derivative of that name as part of the article title.

2) You should avoid criticizing other users of this blog, by name, in your articles if you have black listed or prevented them in some other way from commenting on your article. Generally speaking, it's cheesy to abuse other people in your article.

3) Related to #2, it IS OKAY to write a counter article. That is, if you disagree with someone else's article, you can certainly reference that article (linking to it is fine) and disagree with the article.

4) Debate the issue don't attack the person. I'm getting so sick of reading flame articles by people that are nothing but hate mongering against other people. I don't care if you think someone else is racist, homophobic, atheist, fanatically religious, whatever. It's irrelevant. If you disagree, then disagree. Explain why you disagree. But to just say "You're a racist" or "You're going to burn in hell" or some other nonsense is obnoxious. 

Bottom line: If you want your blog to be full of hatred towards someone else, then go away. We didn't put all this effort to let people's blogs get a lot of attention so that people could use it as a blunt instrument to attack other individuals by name.

One other note: I also get tired of those who think they have some first amendment right to heap personal abuse on people. You want to write a "I hate <insert person's name here>" articles, go make your own site. Whiney "You're a facist, you're censoring me" articles get old in a hurry.

JoeUser is meant to be a place where intelligent thoughtful people of ALL political persuasions can get together and talk about whatever they want. And they can't very well do that if they have to worry that some hate monger is going to write up a post entitled "<User X> is a jerk!" or whatever.