Thought it was time I set out the House Rules of Left of Lightwater. I expect this to grow as issues spring to the fore, but here goes:
– Generally speaking, all the content is mine. Occasionally I’ll reblog something interesting from elsewhere, and very very occasionally I might ask someone to contribute a guest blog. But by and large it’s all written by one person.
– I used to have an open book, freedom of speech, no moderation policy on comments. Then the blog ended up in the local paper…so that’s stopped. Now all comments will be moderated prior to publication. Sometimes I will redact or edit comments prior to publication; I appreciate that the original author won’t necessarily want that, but tough – I need to make sure there aren’t any legally dubious entries.
– Libel is a no-no, but so is anything personally abusive to anyone (apart from George Osborne). We want discussion here, not a slagging match – we want to encourage people to participate in politics, and they won’t do that if they think they’ll be cut down if they put their head over the parapet. “Play the ball, not the man” is the cliché that springs to mind. So any comment which is abusive to an individual will not be published.
– If you wish to contact me “off-blog”, you can email me at leftoflightwater@hotmail.co.uk. Whilst I would much rather have debates out in the open, if there is information or questions you would prefer to share in private, please use the mailbox.
leftoflightwater 
Hi guy ….. wondered if you could publish stats on the Blog useage – number of daily visits, number of visitors overall (maybe should say number of Posters?) etc etc.
It would be good if one could format a post with some basic tools, or even include an image …. but I can see that might be tricky …
Its an excellent digest of local events, please keep up the good work !
Cheers Speedy.
Always slightly worried about posting stats as:
a) it sets one up to fail – if hits go down, people get the wrong impression
b) people with bigger, more successful blogs might laugh
c) it doesn’t really tell you anything.
For example – I get a few hundred hits a day at the moment. It may be that traffic has been driven up by the elections. I have no idea if that’s good, bad, or indifferent – or even if it means anything. It’s a blog about a very small part of the world, most of whom are politically apathetic (all readers excluded, obvs).
The day with the most hits was when Surrey Heath Resident’s Network linked to a comment someone else had written here, and everyone came piling over to have a look – which suggests they’re much more popular (they’ve got a whole borough to write about, post local notices, and of course receive loads of advertising revenue too).
Also, I’ve not seen this done on other blogs, which makes me think others aren’t keen – so there’s probably a good reason, even if I don’t quite know why.
What I have seen, though, is a page like this (House Rules) showing the Top Ten posts so far in terms of popularity – I could do that, if people thought it would be interesting? (It’s generally the ones with the biggest arguments raging underneath).
No worries, understand the points being made. Not too worried about top-ten, actually one can deduce ‘popularity’ from the recent comments summary – to some extent – although perhaps it could have more entries?
So what about the ability to format text?
Cheers, ST
OK, I’ve changed it to show the last 15 comments, which is the maximum it allows.
I can’t allow for text formatting in terms of a nice formatting menu, but I think users can use HTML tags like italics and bold
ah, ok – thought I’d tried that [s]previously[/s] but [i]maybe[/i] [b]noy[/b]
You need to use not [b]
or with more traditional tag delimeters :-
ah, ok – thought I’d tried that previously but maybe not
Not summarising comments on the Home page any more LoL ?
….. makes it a bit of a trawl to find if any new comments have been entered otherwise…..
[Yes, could set up email, but have preferred to look at the site]
Anyways, obviously your call – good to see you back