Until very recently, New York vs Bed Bugs had been working in virtual obscurity. (We have now advanced to relative obscurity!)

We had not attracted too many comments on our site from industry professionals seeking essentially to promote their businesses and products.

It now appears necessary for us to have a comments policy and to clarify other points we are increasingly asked about.

But the problem with rules is that a) nobody reads them, and b) those who would benefit from them are inclined to ignore them anyway, since they may already have multiple compassion, understanding and respect-for-others deficits that really none of us can have any hope of doing anything about. I might add, c) rules may be intimidating to people we would actually love to hear from.

Everywhere on our site we say that we want a public conversation. So, we’re going to have an open comments policy.

I will use my flawed, human judgment to delete what is essentially spam that our automatic spam filters miss.

So don’t write spam. Please add value, extend the conversation and, above all, respect our intelligence. Realize that we have done our homework, that we read constantly, that we talk to people in the field.

Consider, especially, the purpose of our endeavor.

I will add, to make this point explicitly, don’t offend our sensibilities and what we most care about. Don’t question our sincerity and our commitment to this cause because we decline to provide you with free advertising space. We do not support this site with advertising. We do not sell advertising space. We do not, presently, solicit or accept donations. We do not want affiliate relationships with you. We just want to talk about bed bugs and advocate smart bed bug policies.

Write a smart comment. That would be an awesome thing.