A Clean-Up

Right, can I first say that I’m not really concerned what any British blog says about me either directly or “indirectly.”

I do need to point something out though. I did NOT create the terms “troll” or “trolling” -look it up. I do not ban people as “trolls”/”flamers” because their opinion is not the same as mine.  That’s just crap-spouting on someone’s part. Comments are full of posts where people disagree with what I say -in a couple cases they’ve won me over to their arguement. To say I ban people because they do not agree with me shows a total and utter lack of knowledge of CBO and, particularly, myself. Ass.

Now, unless you administrate CBO you do not see the comments I have to remove. There is a certain artist I have no love of but I have deleted very nasty comments of a personal nature about him. Last week I had a very nasty comment left regarding a branch of Forbidden Planet (NOT Bristol) in which the commenter “with no personal agenda” slated the store, called its staff fat and ugly and used several expletives. I tracked the ISP and know who the person was -there is no such thing as anonimity on todays internet.

I have even had comments posted (I keep a record of all ISPs) about certain female creators that were “just critiques” according to the posters but were obscene in places.

CBO was set up to let people have a safe site to read about non-DC/Marvel comics. I know that CBO gets a lot of younger people and even schools occasionally visiting the site. They do not need to see the type of obscenity posted by anonymous anal retentives that CBO was getting.

So I stopped all comments -it’s not as though no one can find my email to comment privately!

But there is a more important factor here. This is MY blog and I decide what goes on it.

You want arguements, name calling and all the childish stuff that goes with it then look around -there are plenty of other blogs doing just that.

This also brings me to the Blog Roll. When CBO was set up in…2005 (moving to Word Press in…2007?) I wanted to provide visitors with links to creator and company web sites in the UK. A sort of one-stop reference point.  A lot of these people suggested reciprocal blog links but never linked to CBO. No matter though. But then you find your internet ‘colleagues’ making scurrilous remarks about you or your site  while in the same breath sending you a news item about their latest comic.

Despite that I have kept the Links live…until yesterday.

I went through all the blog roll links and found that some blogs had not been up-dated in 2-3 years, some no longer existed while others had veered off into politics and one in particular offering porn downloads (?!).
So, you’ll note that the blog roll is much, much smaller and that makes it easier to control. No longer will someone screech “You HAVE to put me on your blog roll!” and I just smile and list them.

To now go on the blog roll you will need to submit your url and I will then check it to see if it conforms to Creator Owned or Company Owned for the new categorisation system I’m trying out. Personal blogs will have to be exceptional to get listed. Oh, and to get onto CBOs blog roll you will need to put a link to CBO on your blog list.

It should make things easier to deal with and once the site gets up-dated it’ll look less crowded.

You’ll notice I do post on comic events that I get info on -from now on only events that supply PRs, etc. will be mentioned on CBO as I’m far too busy to trawl the internet looking for events- so if you organise or run a comic event (UK or outside the UK) get in touch.

Since 2005 I have asked year after year whether anyone attending events and taking photographs of said events could send them in -or even just report on what the event was like. Never a single response to this but the invite is still open!

You can still advertise on CBO -see link at the top of page- and if you look you’ll see the ad rates are VERY affordable. No more big freebie postings.

There, I’m sure that has outraged huge numbers of people but in CBOs 8th year I really do not care.  CBO is here top promote comics and that’s how it’ll stay!