WoC Blog Ops

You know, maybe I’m just in a bad mood about the blog today.

I’m looking back on a massively unpleasant correspondence – an email flame war – with D-Day. I’m reading comments to some old posts and finding less and less of the dialog that’s important to me, and more and more baiting on issues.

Maybe it’s me; maybe I’m frustrated that I can’t stand the people who I’m politically allied with, and can’t agree with the people I like. Maybe I need a longer walk in the woods or a different blog.

But right now, what I need is to see grown-up behavior here on the site. We have an old rule about no sock-puppetry, and we’ve had multiple instances this month of people changing pseuds or posting under different names.

That’s a banning offense – the death penalty on this blog – and I want to remind people that we need to start hanging a few people pour l’ecourager les autres. So from now forward, if you post under another name, you’re gone. We IP match comments, and if you’re on a shared connection, and feel like your Brazilian boyfriend has been using your laptop (ob Glenn Greenwald joke), feel free to email someone after you’ve been banned.

I’m about 30 seconds from requiring commenters to register with a real email address. Seriously.

15 thoughts on “WoC Blog Ops”

  1. One more week, maybe a couple days of decompression, and hopefully things will chill out. Unless there are recounts of course. I cant wait for this election season to end, its giving me ulcers.

  2. Comment registration is mildly irritating, but spam and trolls are incredibly irritating.

    I implemented the Typekey registration system at my blog and have had no trouble whatsoever since.

    Marc, you and I are voting a different way this time, but so what? I don’t care if you agree with me or not. I’d rather read you than most lefties, and I have to read SOMEONE on the Obama side. (You aren’t the only one.) Don’t let disagreement get you down. We’re all friends here. At least most of us are.

  3. Certainly won’t hear any complaints from me.
    DOn’t take my silence as disinterest– just way too busy to maintain any kind of presence, even low-level, at the moment.

    (It’s probably for the best– it’s a week before the election, in a campaign season that’s been going on for about seven years….)

  4. Most blog comment sections seem to be getting worse, I dont even read half the ones I use to. Part of the problem is the lack of any kind of any real ‘nonverbal’ communication, its even worse online then over the phone. It seems a growning portion of comments are intended just to anger, these people wouldnt be making them if we were all in a room together.

    I’d like to think that things might get better after the election, but this doesnt seem like a sudden change. It has just been slowly getting worse for years now and Im not sure when it will stop. I’ve already seen some of this spill out into the real world. While the sock puppetry obviously doesnt transfer, the increasingly crude, and hyper aggresssive attacks on people with really minor differences in opinion may drive people away online but cause alot more problems when prople start to do it in person.

  5. A.L.,

    It’s very rarely right now, especially so close to an election, that political watchers can actually have useful debate, on pretty much anything. Election less than a week away? The rise or decline of the world in the balance?

    Yeah, people will go overboard. I happen to think people go overboard right now more on the right – take a look at the Palin rallies, or two plots uncovered to take out Barack – but it happens on both sides.

    Maybe it will get better after the election – I can still learn something by my well-intended but utterly misguided fellow commentators on the right – but it ain’t happenin’ when there’s an election to win!

  6. Wow. I agree with hypocrisyrules (except for the “more on the right” part). I think that’s one of the seven signs of the apocalypse.

  7. Let me 2nd Michael Totten’s comments in #6; and while I can’t speak of the experience from the blogger’s point of view, and a frequent reader and commenter registration is a tiny burden compared to the benefits.

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