Creatively Creative Commons License

For this blog, I chose the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Creative Commons License, because there are some original creative work which are published on the blog.

The license essentially allows others to share the posts that I make, and/or adapt it into any form or medium, provided they attribute the work to me and give me proper due credit. It does not allow commercial use of any of my posts, as I do not want anyone to make money off of my creative ideas without my expressed and explicit permission and/or involvement in the project.

What this means is, anyone who reads a blog post I make about a certain topic is more than welcome to copy and paste and excerpt from the post, attach it to their own and engage with it, provided of course they link back to my blog post, instead of passing the idea off as their own. Similarly, the small (and sub-par) pieces of fiction that were published here (they’re hidden now, but if they hadn’t been, it was easily accessible) would not be allowed to be adapted for commercial purposes in any way or form.

Of course, a small gathering of pixels isn’t the police. Nor can it stop spammers from rudely making this blog ugly.

As this was also mostly my personal blog until recently, spam hadn’t been a major issue in my comments area: that is, I have received the odd spam comment from either a spambot or a troll. In the past, if I saw one of these comments, I would either manually delete them, or sarcastically respond to it, but that was when the traffic I gained were mostly from people who personally knew me.

Let’s pretend for a second that I was running a professional or interest-themed blog (which, for the next Semester, I actually am). There is the option with WordPress to automatically moderate and delete any comments that involve more than two hyperlinks. In fact, WordPress offers bloggers varying degrees of spam and comment control.

To begin with, users could turn off “anyone can comment, as long as they have an email address”, because many times fake emails are accepted. By restricting it to “only someone with a WordPress account”, it means often the comment maker could be traced back to their account. I was also given the option to moderate comments, and only allow comments through automatically if they had been allowed by me before. Finally, I was given the choice to simply disallow all comments until I’d moderated each and every single one of them.

I feel that the last choice is anti-constructive to a blog which is inviting people to comment and discuss. For now, I’ve kept the setting at WordPress accounts only, but as my posts reach further into the deep corners of worldly topics, I may have to turn on light moderation. Especially if I begin to touch on sensitive topics which may be triggers for certain readers, in order to prevent insensitive comment makers from hurting potential victims.

Alex.