There was a recent article stating that blacklists shouldn't be used on featured articles. Backstory: it's someone who disagrees with my blacklisting him and unleashed a torrent of attack articles in response. The disagreement is because an article of mine is featured and he wants the ability to take the feud he insists on perpetuating to that article.

The purpose of a blacklist is to control who can comment on your blog. The idea is that if you have a disagreement with someone you do have the ability to block them. It is not a perfect feature, as many have reqadily found out and exploited.

I must point out at this moment that comments do not even need to be enabled for someone to be featured. It's the article that gets featured, not the forum.

If you disagree with the article you have the perfect freedom to write a counterpoint (sidenote: I have often found myself hoping that more point/counterpoint articles got featured. It happens sometimes, but rarely is an intelligent, cohesive point met with a similarly well structured counterpoint. Attacking the person doesn't make for a strong counterpoint, plain and simple).

If we remove blacklists for featured articles we discourage quality writing. After all, why would I want to write an article if I knew that people who were on blacklist for good reason could select a featured number and attack at will? While many blacklists are simply personal disagreement based, some are not. Some are to block some rather serious and unfunny online harassment.

The question as to whether blacklists should apply to featured articles was not a bad one, honestly. The answer, in my opinion, is, yes they should. Otherwise the blacklist has no point.