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Comment by bdonlan | Hacker News Reader

Ow. Please put in some paragraph breaks, it's a nightmare to try to read a long wall of text like that without some kind of landmark to latch on to.

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I think he might have been a little upset when he wrote it.

You read that and your first reaction is punctuation?

It is mentally arduous to try to parse through it. I really tried but had to give up.

Punctuation exists for good reason.

OK, fair enough. I thought you were just nitpicking. And after reading about his ordeal, I wasn't really open to nitpicking. As one human to another, I would suggest that when commenting on a highly-emotional blog post like this one, where the author has lived through a difficult experience, prefacing your criticism on their punctuation/grammar with a simple "wow, tough experience" or some other kind words would go a long way. Chances are high that this individual will read your words.

We can debate whether or not the ordeal was deserved or not, but I don't think many of us can honestly deny that he lived through a tough experience.

To those downvoting me, that's fine. But please realize that I was trying to uphold one of this community's core tenets, which is don't write things you wouldn't say to someone in real life (paraphrasing). I don't know groggles, but I'm guessing that he/she is an emotionally-mature adult, and so I can't imagine him/her saying to someone who just described being jailed and harassed by customs, "Please enunciate better when you talk -- I had a hard time understanding you". To me at least, this kind of attitude represents a major reason for the decline of online communities. Sometimes I just can't watch it happen without saying something.

Whether intentionally or not, your own post came off as fairly rude, in my opinion much moreso than the parent, which is probably why you were downvoted.

You are replying to a different person than the original poster.

Secondly, no, emotional situations don't excuse the delivery. Unless he was literally writing a cry for help from confinement somewhere, he can take the time and respect readers by putting in some semblance of appropriate formatting. If it's just a rant then so be it, but it doesn't belong here.

Thirdly, HN isn't a support group. I'm not going to bother with comforting words because the parts I could decipher give the image of a very naive, assumptive, flippant person. So many mistakes were made -- on their part (at the very outset by proclaiming a right to enter another country -- that I'm surprised that they spent the effort seeking sympathy.

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