Tuesday, March 21, 2006

A Blogger Survey

I have been blogging since the summer of 2004, and up till now have not had any experiences with negative comments (other than spam). Imagine my surprise when I opened my email inbox today to find two anonymous comments. They were both in Bangla, and one of them referred to me as a "khanki" (whore). I can just see some 13-year-old rich kid sitting in Dhaka on his computer, laughing at his own wit and ability to string together nasty words.

Anyways, here's my question for all of you bloggers out there. How many of you have had any experiences with negative and unsolicited comments? What did you do about it? Did it seem to be a one-time thing or did they come back to harass you again and again?

Thanks for the input.

Katie "not a khanki" Zaman

3 comments:

Sonya said...

Hi Katie: I've unfortunately received a few upsetting anonymous comments recently that seem to be written by the same person each time (the tone of language and syntax were very similar). Having a self-diagnosed anxiety issue, I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about those negative comments for the rest of the day after I got the email. That's actually the reason that I got rid of my comments for a little while and only recently reactivated them.

I understand that inherent in keeping a public blog on the WWW is the risk that people will feel entitled to judge and/or harass the author. I decided that I needed to either eliminate comments all together or ignore them and not feel bad about a small person with little else to do than say hurtful things to strangers...anonymously. The comments have stopped since I've been ignoring them and not posting them to my blog. Here's hoping yours do too.

Cheers!

p.s.~ Isaac is so cute and sophisticated! From everything that Tanya has mentioned and from your weblog I feel as though I know him already. I love Isaac stories! :)

Anonymous said...

Katie,
I am a friend of Zeenat and I sometimes check her friends list, that's how i came upon your blog and I enjoy the entries very much. I have my own blog at Live Journal and I actually had to make it for friends only. Why? Well for the very reason you are talking about. The whole Khanki crowd was way too negative for me. You are not alone.


Nitu

Katie said...

Thank you so much for your comments! After I got over the initial unpleasantness, I came to terms with the fact that immaturity will always exist.

Thanks for all the advice! I'm glad I'm not alone!