(The Nintendo Girlfriends’ Guide to Gaming post will be up as soon as I get the photos from the girls at Brand About Town. I took very few of my own, as I was too busy gaming and chatting.)

I met a fellow blogger at my Nintendo party the other night! For the purposes of this particular post, she shall remain nameless. We got to talking about – what else? – blogging and the act of moving one’s blog, as I did recently. She confided that she’s moved her blog several times, and one of those times the move was prompted by some Mean People.

There’s a common conception in the blog world that when you start getting trolls, spammers, and the occasional negative “you suck” sort of comment on your blog, you’re on the right track to “making it.” People are noticing you. Your URL is getting hits from bots because it’s getting hits from people. They’re annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, the spammers and bots and trolls kind of mean that you’re moving on up. So we deal with them through Akismet and other filters.

But we should not have to deal with Mean People. Mean People attack us personally and use our comment sections as a place to spew venom and say hurtful things to the person behind the blog. Mean People don’t care if their comments are moderated, they just want to put their vile thoughts on the blogger’s screen so she has to read them before she can delete them.

Mean People need to go back to MySpace with the other rotten, immature teenagers. No blogger, whatever her stance on anything as a writer or as a person, deserves personal attack. Especially in her personal space.

New Blog Friend, I encourage you to take action. I encourage all of us to protect ourselves from Mean People.

Those of us who host our blogs on Wordpress.org can make a quick fix by means of a plugin called WP-Ban. It allows you to ban specific IP addresses from ever accessing your page again, and you can use it to block Mean People as well as spammers and bots. Just copy the IP address on the comments they leave, drop it into a certain text field, save, and you’re done. You can even choose what kind of message you want to show up on the screen when they try to access your domain.

I wish I knew how to do something similar on Wordpress.com and on Blogger. There ought to be something to protect people on every content management system. Mean People are the blogosphere equivalent of the junior high school bully – and should be treated as such. Shut them up.

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Bloggers, please share so we all know: Have the Mean People gotten to your blog? What platform do you use, and what did you do?