Friday, September 16th, 2005...6:28 am
Housekeeping and Cautionary Tales
Those of you that post comments to this blog will find that I have added a “verification” to the comments section. When you comment, you will now be asked to type a word (really random letters)
I know this will be inconvienient for you, but it seems to be the only practical way to cut down on spam posts to this board. The other option, restricting posting to Blogger members, was off the table since many of the readers of this are not members, and I’d like you to continue to post comments.
It seems that every day I was deleting one or two spam posts, some of them repeats. I don’t know if this is the result of a flaw with Blogger software, or if there is another reason for this. The disturbing thing is that in a few cases, the spam has come from Blogger members. Hopefully, Blogger will figure out some way to screen these folks out.
I have a long post on my other board about some goings on with a blogger who blogged about our local music scene. Yeah, a lot of “inside baseball” there, but there are some important lessons that some of the rest of us bloggers can learn from.
One that I saw was how easy it is to not only use blogging to promote a political or social agenda, but can use them to pursue personal vendettas. The relative ease of publishing and anonymity make this an easy trap to fall into. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t comment on the BS my brother was going through for a while, but it is a trap that I fell into when writing about the troubles of a former YDA secretary.
One thing I didn’t touch on is how it is too easy to post, so you don’t think about it. For example, Daniel Patterson wrote a comment on his blog about Trasoff’s victory on Tuesday. He used the term “Latte Liberal” which offended me. So I posted a snarky comment back. Turns out, Patterson was being facetious. A muscle kicked in when I read the comment because of the silly things I had heard from Farley supporters in the run up to the primary (one was from a guy who told me that he and Farley were working class folks; he told me this while standing in front of Food Conspiracy with a bag of groceries that included a four dollar jar of spaghetti sauce.) The muscle also kicks in when I see some local bloggers complain about the “inactivity” of the local Democratic party, mostly posted by people who have never knocked on the door for one of our candidates. I’ve avoided responding to those.
Elizabeth Rogers told me that they used this blog durring a Young Democrats executive meeting to find stats on Nina Trasoff’s race. I don’t think I had a lot of stats, but hey.
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