A moment of forbearance, please, dear friends. With any luck, this will be the absolute, positive last time I will inflict this discussion on you.
Since the results of the BoB awards were posted, I received a lot of lovely words, on e-mail and here on PTMYB, from many of you. Most of you were congratulatory, which is delightful. Some of you cried "you wuz robbed!," which is less delightful, but I understand that it came from a place of love. After all, we all love it when good things happen to our friends, and if we think that something is amiss, it is in our nature to call foul when we see it. But I have heard mutterings of "you wuz robbed" that imply darker motives on behalf of the other contestants in this contest, and that, dear friends, is not cool. (Likewise, the person who accused me in an e-mail of similar darker motives, that's not cool, either, but we'll get to that.)
Dear ones, the point of the BoB Awards was not just to bring recognition to people who blog, and blog well; it was also to introduce us to each other. There are a lot of us, toiling away with varying degrees of commitment and complexity, so many of us that it's not always possible to sort out the better noise from the just-plain-louder noise. Hence the good people at One on One decided to do something about this, and for all the fighting about methodology and vote-certifying, they did the job and did it very well. One thing is for certain: thanks to the BoBs, I now regularly visit nine new sites I hadn't been aware of before. And -- because, to paraphrase Pee-Wee Herman, everybody's got a big "and" -- the authors of those nine sites regularly visit me. I visited their sites, I left comments, I invited them to visit, they visited, they left comments, and thus do conversations start.
You are probably wondering if we are tap-dancing in the vicinity of a point yet. Yes, we are. The point is that unless, or until, you troll me, everyone is welcome here. No one should ever feel like there is a table in the cafeteria at which they don't belong. If I start hearing comments, no matter how oblique, about whether the results of this contest were manipulated, particularly if they are directed at any particular individual, I will take them down. I am not fooling around when I say this.
I have already taken down one comment, from someone I really love, who I know only meant it as an expression of love, but in my judgment, it still had to go. It doesn't matter how oblique a comment may be: even if the author of the comment doesn't identify the subject, and only the subject knows that s/he is the subject, it's still coming down. There is nothing worse than stumbling across a harsh comment about you on a public site, particulary when the commenter doesn't think you'll find it. Friends, it's a small world out there. You would be surprised how findable we all are.
Of course, this cuts both ways. If you are a new visitor to this page, you are more than welcome, as I said above. If, however, you decide it would be really cute to start trolling me, or my husband, or my friends, just wait and see how fast I move. Your comment will be deleted (unless I choose to keep it up so that we can mock it) and your IP address will be banned. Remember that troll who said that evil, vicious shit about Lloyd? Of course you don't. There's a reason.
Now please. Let us be kind to one another. But if we can't be kind to one another, let us take it somewhere else. Like here, for example. 