Alas, those days and the concurrent politeness are gone. I've had two blogs/websites listed to the right for a while and both bloggers/webmasters recently deleted some comments I made on their blogs.
You're probably jumping to conclusions thinking, what crazy shit did I say on their blogs? On one blog, I said 'Ditto, I agree with the above commenter'. And the website owner deleted my comment. Nothing risque, no profanity. The comment I was agreeing with was equally vanilla except the commenter was questioning the blogger's whole reason for having the website (it has gotten whiny and super redundant). You're a writer, you're frustrated, you've been rejected by oodles of literary journals. Okayyy ... not sure how you milked that one for over a year.
I could write a fucking novel on the freaky crap that happened to me (and my scripts) when I tried to break into the rigged spec screenplay market back in 1997-2000. I burned entire weekends and hundreds of dollars on the Hollywood Creative Directory, SASEs and query letters that I mailed fifty at a time.
I blew money I didn't have on entry fees to The Austin Heart of Film, Slamdance, Maui Writer's Conference, etc. To what end? I got part of one one script pirated by an A-list star. Though it probably wasn't him personally. More likely it was his assistant's assistant or maybe the AD's assistant who eventually ended up making a film that was somewhat like my script minus the suspense but close enough that they used the same name for a key character. And this was no Jane Jones or John Smith, it was an uncommon name with a specific spelling.
But who cares, that was a hundred years ago. So for the sake of looking forward, I've deleted that particular blog amongst the links at right. I've got better things to do than use this blog to feed the hit counts on a mediocre site that seems to be focused on looking backward at past literary failures, something any professional writer wouldn't have time to do.
