One regular reader and commenter wrote in to say that her/his recent comments were not appearing and wondered whether she/he had been banned so I thought I would clarify the comments situation.
The first point is that I have not banned anyone. First time commenters will have to wait for me to approve it (this is a spam prevention measure) and that might take a few hours for me to get to it, but once your initial comment has been approved, all subsequent comments should appear immediately without my approval.
Having said all that, you would have noticed that we have transformed the format and during the transition there have been instances of people’s comments ‘disappearing’. If that happens to you, please send me an email and I will investigate and see if it can be fixed.
The first point is that I have not banned anyone.
Prof. Singham might reconsider if Anthony McCarthy shows up here. He has already been given the heave ho by Jason Rosenhouse and Larry Moran.
Incidentally, what is Prof. Singham’s position relative to the use of bad language, particularly the f word. He may have noticed that there was a rather unpleasant exchange between one olivercrangle and myself a few threads back (Mr. crangle was just given the heave ho by Greta Christina), initiated by crangle.
Is link formatting broken?
I’ve tried using my usual syntax, like this except with angle brackets:
[a href=”my.url”]clickable text[/a]
and it doesn’t work as I’d expect, at least not in preview mode—the clickable text is extra large and on the left, with the following text to its right.
(I’m using a fairly recent version of Firefox, 17.0.1, on a Mac.)
I guess I’ll put that here (with angle brackets of course)and see how it works if actually post it…
clickable text Here’s hoping…
OK, that looks right when I actually post it… I guess preview is a bit broken.
Yes, the preview seems to be the problem. I’ll inform the webmaster.
I really don’t have a position on language. I figure the people here are adults who can deal with words.
It may be spam protection gone haywire. I found all my comments started going straight to the spam filter one day; after a while I got in touch with the webmaster and found that the software used to filter out spam messages has been tightened up, after a number of spammers got craftier about how they posted. As a result, legit posts were being dumped too.
As long as people respect the sacred words: “Ni”, “Peng”, and “Nee-wom”!
That may explain it. For a week or so, the site was overwhelmed with spam comments. I was spending an enormous amount to time moderating comments that were spam. The catch with tightening up the filters is that it increases the chances of false positives, i.e., legitimate comments being identified as spam.
Thank you for your quick response. Since my last post went up without a hitch, I am hopeful that the problem is sorted.
From memory. The UK only recently dumped its blasphemy law. The National Secular Society tried to provoke a test case by blaspheming on purpose but failed. Idiot Christian Steven Green then sued the BBC over their screening of Jeremy Springer the Opera, lost his case, bankrupted himself, and, as a bonus, got the blasphemy law repealed.
Idiot PM Tony Blair tried to saddle us with a new law against ‘Incitement to Religious Hatred’ which would have been blasphemy under a different name, but failed due to hard campaigning by the NSS and a mistake by the Labour Chief Whip*, which led to a very watered down version being passed.
*In UK politics the Whip is the guy who has the job of rounding up the right number of party members to vote on an important issue, in this case, the Chief Whip miscounted and told TB that he could go home early and, as a result, the vote was lost by one vote. Disappointingly, there is no actual whipping involved.