Enforcing Civility in Blog Comments

Alan Jacobs: "Nothing could better justify Ross’s decision to start moderating comments on his blog than the comments on the announcement itself." For those who don't click links, Ross Douthat has announced that, "From now on, one of the Atlantic's crack interns will be going through the comment threads at the end of every business day, deleting any comments that ...

Gravatars, Activate!

WordPress now supports Gravatars organically (a function of Automaticc, the parent company of the former, having acquired the latter) so I've had OTB's comments section tweaked to support them. So, go sign up for a free one if you want to have a distinguishing logo displayed next to your comments. (Gravatars are populated based on email addresses so, if you're ...

The End of 9 to 5

John Wesley (a different one; the theologian passed on some years back) argues that the 9-to-5 office worker will become a thing of the past, as businesses come to realize that it is an anachronism of the manufacturing age. As most of us have worked in an office know, we lose the ability to concentrate after a couple of ...

Why Haven’t We Written About . . .

Orin Kerr explains the strange silence of the Volokh Conspirators on the Gonzalez-U.S. Attorneys affair: Of course we are all political hacks! Our secret trick is that we alternate which side to spin: sometimes we are political hacks for the right, and sometimes we are political hacks for the left. Naive readers occasionally mistake this for principle, but I trust the ...

Commenting Quality on Blogs

Thomas Barnett has experimented with having his columns posted on group blogs and has been disappointed in the quality of commentary he gets there compared to those at his own site. He proposes that "the tighter the focus and personnel in the blog/site, the better and more focused the commentary." My experience from having run blog comments sections for more ...

Comments Functionality (Updated/Bumped)

The tag team of Mark Jaquith and King of Fools have, apparently at least, fixed the bug that has been causing machine language characters to appear in blog comments that included pasted quotation marks, em dashes, and so forth. Let me know if you have further problems. UPDATE: Unfortunately, fixing the bug apparently created a new one: Now, ...

The Final Word on Sock-Puppetry?

Patrick Frey has an incredibly long post, illustrated with actual puppets, dissecting every nook and cranny of the Glenn Greenwald sock puppertry blogstorm. All I know is that, were I a criminal, I would ply my trade outside his jurisdiction. If he can apply this much effort to ferreting out whether someone posted some blog comments ...

Glenn Greenwald’s IP Address Stolen

Last night, I posted of Rusty Shackleford's coming under simultaneous assault from the Islamists and the Indian government. This morning, I learn that lefty blogger extraordinaire Glenn Greenwald--who is a famous constitutional scholar, has a bestselling book, is quoted by important Senators and media types alike, and has risen to the heights of blogitude in a mere nine months--has ...

Racists, RedState, and the GOP Netroots

Matt Stoler asserts that the reason that the Republican Party does not work as closely with its "netroots" as the Democrats with theirs is that, The RNC cannot afford to embrace their netroots as an audience because of the increasingly extreme and racist nature of  their base.  It's not Redstate specifically, it is, as Glenn Greenwald notes, their entire pundit ...

Washington Post Blog Shuts Off Comments

The Washington Post shut down comments on their blog yesterday [The Post has a blog? -ed. Apparently.] after the shocking discovery that many people on the Internet are less than civil: As of 4:15 p.m. ET today, we have shut off comments on this blog indefinitely. At its inception, the purpose of this blog was to open a dialogue about this site, ...