Comments
Comments are moderated and while differing opinions are encouraged, but anything lowering the tone may be rejected. Racism, abuse or ad hominem attacks are examples of grounds for rejection. The Mule’s decision is final. If you are not happy about this, write your own blog!
Privacy
Back in 2000, Sun MicroSystems CEO Scott McNealy said “Privacy is dead, deal with it.” Anything you do on the internet, including visiting the Stubborn Mule will leave traces. For example, the machines that host this blog keeps records of the time of your visit and which pages you looked at. All of this information is also sent to Google Analytics, which helps me get an idea of how popular different Mule posts are. In the process, other information is recorded including your internet connection’s IP address, which can show which Internet Service Provider (ISP) you use and gives a reasonable indication of where in the world you are. If you go to some lengths, you can mask some of this information, but that chances are you do not.
None of this is specific to the Stubborn Mule: it happens all the time when you surf the web. If you want to understand more about this, visit the Policies page on Stilgherrian’s blog. which goes into more detail.
In any event, there is only so much comfort this site’s privacy policies can provide. The only piece of information that you do have some control over when visiting this site is your email address. If you post a comment, there is a field where you can enter an address. This is optional and it will never be made visible to visitors to the blog. If you do enter an email address, it can be used to automatically provide you with updates when others add comments to the same blog post. Your email address will be sent to administrators of the blog (currently, Sean Carmody is the only administrator). This email address will not be passed on to anybody else.
The Stubborn Mule uses Feedburner to manage email subscriptions, so if you subscribe for updates via email, your email address will be collected by Google as they own Feedburner. These email addresses are only used to send out Stubborn Mule update notifications. Google maintain an overarching privacy policy that applies to all of their sites and services.