Blogging FAQ, Part 3: Building a community

Welcome to part 3, the final (yay!) part of my compiling and know-it-all-ingly answering of some really common WoW blogging questions.

If you can’t find your question here, check out part 1 and part 2 for the earlier installments of this scarily long WoW blogging FAQ.

Questions on how to get comments and how to build a good relationship with readers are those that seem to come up the most (since, for most of us, interacting with readers is what makes blogging so addictive), so they’re getting their own dedicated post.

I also feel the need to mention that while most Laws of Blogging are pretty universal, I’m writing with a focus on the WoW blogging community. Each blogging circle has a culture of its own and our local customs might not necessarily be applicable to the blogging world at large.

A Quick Note on Comments

I never drafted up a comment policy because, really, I’ve never had to. In a small blog like this, issues in comments rarely come up. Even when I get into very controversial topics, I’m impressed by the maturity and quality of the resulting discussion.

I’m also not very anal about rules in comments. I’m fine with people disagreeing with me, I’m fine with some discussions going slightly off topic, and as long as you guys are ok with it, I’m fine with you guys disagreeing with each other.

But after thinking about this for a few days, there’s one thing I’m not going to tolerate:

Berating, judging and overall nastyness targeted at specific individuals or bloggers who are not participating in the discussion.

I’m also not going to put up with anyone telling me who I can and can’t link to, other than, of course, the person being linked to and the wordpress TOS.

I don’t think I really need to put a disclaimer anywhere, after all this is my blog and what I do with comments is my choice, but since a few days went by before I decided to delete those comments (actually, I didn’t delete them, I flagged them as spam) I thought I owed somewhat of an explanation.

But yeah, I don’t want to get caught up on blog wars that don’t concern me.

Respectful criticism of a quote, of a blog post (with link included!) or a well known event is totally ok, but personal vendettas have no place here.

Well hello healing non-meme traffic

So here I was in my quiet corner of the internet when my hit counter went nuts. “Uh oh, I must be overwelmed by spam bots or something” I panicked for a second. A little bit of research lead me to discover that Miss Medicina’s Healing Questionnaire got featured on Wow.com.

Geez, had I known that my answering the survey would cause the internet to show up at my doorstep, I would have tidied up a little bit!

I’ve been enjoying going around reading all responses. The diversity of answers is really beautiful. Out of all the roles in the game, I’ve found healing to be the one closest to an art, where there are basic rules, but different formulas work for different people and each healer has a unique style. There is one thing that I’d like to emphasize, though. I have seen some reactions I didn’t exactly approve of. We are bloggers. Blogging isn’t about writing black and white systematic reviews. It’s highly personal and opinionated, but it also provokes discussion. While some bloggers who partook in the survey are hardcore, farming heroic Anub’Arak healers, others heal exclusively in 5 mans and the rest are somewhere in between. As well, there were replies from seasonned bloggers alongside replies from very new bloggers. Anyway, my point is, or points are, we each come from a different healing and writing background and we are sharing our experience. If any of you read information that you disagree with or that is “false” or you read something that isn’t clear, then please please please do say something, but do it in the form of a comment on the post in question. Don’t secretly do it on your own blog, don’t do it on wow.com. We are bloggers, we welcome discussion.

Same goes with any post. I look at where my incoming traffic comes from, which posts they read and I think “oh boy!” If the information on a blog is inaccurate, debatable, offensive or has room for improvement, sparking a bit of discussion does everyone a favor.