The Objective Standard's Horribly Stupid Blog Moderation

I liked the article Kudos to Israel for Taking Steps to Defend Its Citizens Against Hamas from The Objective Standard.

It ended by saying:

Israel deserves not only our moral blessing for defending its citizens, but our unequivocal encouragement to do whatever it can to destroy Hamas once and for all.

Seeing it with zero comments, I figured I would offer moral blessing and encouragement to Israel. I didn't want to see an article of this nature have no positive comments. So I quickly posted this comment:

I agree and support Israel too.

Then I noticed they moderate comments, and I thought it was sad that a bunch of readers would miss my comment due to moderation delay. And I thought it was lame because there might already have been positive comments I didn't see. Then I checked back a bit later and saw my comment was no longer pending moderator approval. Nor was it posted. They deleted it. So I posted this:

You guys say Israel deserves our encouragement but then block my encouraging comment saying I support Israel? I don't get it.

Which they also blocked. The article still has no comments as I write this.

What an awful experience and awful approach to moderation. I've never before found a blog where you couldn't post "I agree". Let alone where you couldn't post "I [...] support Israel" in reply to a blog post which concludes by saying people should support Israel.

If you're going to have a moderation policy that violates user expectations and surprises them by deleting what they write, you should at least clearly explain what the policy is and warn people. But they don't do that. They just write:

Comments submitted to TOS Blog are moderated. To be considered for posting, a comment must be fewer than 400 words in length. If accepted, it will be posted soon.

This fails to communicate the comments are super serious, let alone explain what standards are used. Nor does it link to some explanation of what's going on, or how to write comments that will be approved. And it actually communicates the comments aren't very serious by imposing a length limit which is pretty incompatible with serious discussion.

Oh, and they made me register an account before I could comment have my comments deleted. (At most blogs I've seen, including my own, you don't have to deal with registration to post comments.)

What a horrible experience. But I liked the article and think the content is important. They could do a lot more good if they wouldn't mistreat friendly people so badly.