Friday, August 29, 2008

Anonymous comments - automatically rejected

Garnel Ironheart's comment to "Chabad - how to moderate comments?":

Okay guys, look. At the bottom of this comment screen you have four options for leaving a name. One is called Name/URL. Click on that and you can choose a screen name but you DON'T have to choose a URL which means your name is untraceable.

But pick a name, guys! It's hard to keep track of so many anonymouses. Or is it one guy who's especially pleased with himself?

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Starting now - anonymous comments will be automatically rejected. Resubmit them with a name

4 comments :

  1. Hey wait, important question: If it's one anonymous, why isn't the plural anonymice?

    Get it? Get it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Question about rejecting anonymous comments: Maybe you are shooting yourself in the foot with your new chumra.

    I think the rules against anonymous postings may be too harsh and will definitely drive away readers and posters.

    If Blogger and Wikipedia deem it ok for there to be room for anonymous postings, you should not be creating a higher threshold, "holier than the Pope as it were".

    This is not USENET -- it's the Blogosphere and one of the "rights" that ALL bloggers expect, assume and are granted in the Blogosphere at large is to remain anonymous if they so choose to be. Not everyone wishes to be bold and up front, even with a quacky nick-name.

    I still do not get why you had to take such a strong measure when you do have the power to edit out and refuse any and all comments?

    Personally, I always choose a consistent name and I never post under anonymous, but on the web many people are VERY much afraid of even giving a hint of a name, any type of name, in order not to be tracked down or be "pegged"

    Think it over.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh come on. It's not that hard to come up with a screen name that says nothing about you. Anonymous is confusing because of the way it mignles different opinions and prevents one from accurately following the discussion thread.
    With a little imagination and the use of the Name/URL option without putting in a URL, this problem can easily be solved.

    ReplyDelete
  4. garnel, I must say that you have done more harm than good here with this suggestion that Dr. Eidensohn has incredibly taken you up on, and I wish he hadn't.

    Just how many people do you think read this blog? And surely of those, it is a VERY small fraction that wish to post ANY comments and even fewer who wish to post anonymous comments. And of all those, ALMOST all are highly intelligent and experienced BLOGGERS who can follow the comments of MANY anonymous posters simultaneously, especially since Dr. Eidensohn keeps his own main posts essentially brief, and most posts have historically not drawn more than a handful of comments (usually less than ten) on this daas torah blog and the one time that a post recently drew a little over twenty comments with a perhaps less than half being anonymous, you press Dr. Eidensohn's panic buttons and he responds to YOU alone for some odd reasons, and he then willingly sets up a new self-defeating policy based on YOUR narrow and tendentious input alone because ONLY you seem to have had trouble with following posts by anonymous posters. If you are that cognitively challenged it may indicate something else not related to blogging (how much do you know about blogging and posting on the web by the way?) but this phony "cure" of literally forcing people to take on ID's (like cyber yellow stars, lehavdil) is coercive and silly in the extreme and with all the bold announcements it makes this Blog seem somewhat stilted and comical and intellectually challenged, unable to hold up to rigorous debate with comments coming in at a steady rate, not quite at lightning speed ever, you must admit (as Dr. Eidensohn does not allow automatic postings and insists on reading each new post himself) and claiming to be artificially worried that comments can be "sneaked on" here when Dr. Eidensohn as this blog's owner has all the power to edit out and remove any and all posts at will and not just anonymous ones. Even me having to argue this with you is such a waste, but it sems you don't get what you are doing to harm this blog's heretofore dynamism and fluidity.

    Who knows, soon we may even be told that no comments will be allowed unless we first click on the "PayPal" button and make a donation to Dr. Eidensohn for the "privilge" to post a comment, like some kind of cyber-toll, since you have already come up with your own cyber-censoring and digital excision of anonymous comments, because who can tell where things will lead once people start making up their own crazy infantile excuses-for-rules in the name of "helpfulness"?

    So that this silly ban of anonymous postings is a scare tactic that works AGAINST the interests of the blog and its owner who should desire and relish MORE traffic and interest in his posts and not create fake barriers that put people off.

    To repeat, posting anonymously is assumed to be a UNIVERSAL virtual right (good pun!) in the Blogosphere by EVERYONE, which works far different to USENET or Email lists.

    Bloggers EXPECT and indeed deserve more lattitude in how to name and frame their posts, and if they wish to be anonymous, provided they are polite and reasonable, their is no reason to ban them outright as if they were some sort of "new kind od treif" which they are most certainly not!

    Admit it, you made a mistaken and clearly INEXPERIENCED feeble suggestion and in turn Dr. Eidensohn as this blog's owner who is anxious to please and streamiline made a poor decision to his own detriment. Maybe when his posts attract hundreds of anonymous posters each he would get nervous, but quite honestly the UOJ blog has allowed hundreds of anonymous psost when he deems them appropriate and noone has ever complained of confusion.

    When in doubt ask questions and seek clarifications but do not stifle people'e rights to answer any way they please, including anonymously.

    So why do you have to assume that people posting and reading this blog are more thin skinned and by implication more dim-witted than UOJ's anonymous posters when they are clearly quite the opposite.

    So have the guts to withdraw your suggestion because as you can already see, rather than encouraging more comments, it actually reduces and stifles them, and we all lose because many fascinating and important statements and arguments are often made by anymous posts and posters.

    ReplyDelete

ANONYMOUS COMMENTS WILL NOT BE POSTED!
please use either your real name or a pseudonym.