Where are the comments?
Alan has asked me to explain why the comments indicator after a post sometimes gives an inaccurate number and why on sme occasions all the comments after a post are disappearing for a time then reappearing. The technically accurate answer is that I don't know. I've asked Paul Ferguson at ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online to take a look at this recurring problem. The good news is that Paul has made a fair bit of progress in dealing with our recent spam problems which prevented commenters from responding to each other for a couple of weeks. Thanks to Paul for his persistence with that. And thanks also to commenters for their patience. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blogs initiative is still in trail phase and ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Blogs Central in London will be rolling out some new technology in the early summer that will hopefully counter some of the problems we've be seeing.
Comments
There were suggestions, probably by newer subscribers, that the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ were censoring comments - perish the thought!
Alan,
Rest assured that there's no censorship involved. We encourage robust debate and discussion on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blogs -- within the bounds of the law, of course.
Unfortunately with an open blog a lot of the problems that the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has experienced are bound to occur.
The ideal blogs to me are the private ones. I used to participate in a Shakespeare blog and one had to be approved before one could read and post to the blog. That blog was against any discussion of 'The Shakespeare Authorship question' which is a particular interest of mine and so I eventually went elsewhere. But the quality of the discussions there was extremely high.
A couple of months ago I started a blog to see what interest there would be in rational discussion of recent books, articles etc on philosophy, religion and social politics. It has been received very well but at the moment I have to reject a lot of posts from people who basically have nothing useful to say other than to give their 'opinion' on other people's comments. Those types of comments lead to nothing useful.
I have offered several people and organizations an opportunity to partcipate. Once a sufficient amount of time has passed for me to determine the level of interest (another month or two with the present trend in participation) I will take the blog private with the most active participants. That way only approved individuals will be able to participate and I will no longer need to approve and moderate comments before they are published - they would appear on the blog instantly.
The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blog of course can't go the privatization route so I guess we should just put up with the problems. Unfortunately the 'junk' people out there are always going to find a way to disrupt a good thing in the public square. I see that the WashingtonPost blog 'On Faith' suffers from some similar problems. A really good example of junk comments is unfortunately those I see on Richard Dawkins' website. But if that is the level of discussion coming out of the secular humanism community 'at large' then McGrath is probably right "Pentecostalism has nothing to fear!"
Regards,
Michael
³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s hardware/software on its blog sites has been very unreliable in the last several months. Sometimes it works perfectly, sometimes with great difficulty, and sometimes not at all. That's why you will often see the same response multiple times in a row, the contributor is not sure if the message has been successfully transmitted and tries again. Too bad ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ didn't take the opportunity to outsource its entire IT department to India during its recent extended visit. There are many there with the competence to fix it and keep it working properly. Same for its recent extended visit to America.
Does ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ censor its entries? Sometimes it does. For example, no dissenting views whether mild or extreme will be published about the recently captured ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ reporter Alan Johnston until he is released. ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ does not extend the same to the kidnap victims of other news organizations or groups, for example, it has not restricted debate about the 15 Royal Navy captives of Iran.
Will
Hopefully the new system will have easy ways of showing quotes and a spellchecker wood be very useful esp in my case.
Re #5
You can use simple html code to show quotes etc.
Michael
know all!!
mark
You know very well I'm referring to this blog!
7. At 08:46 PM on 30 Mar 2007, alan watson wrote:
know all!!
I didn't understand this comment??
Michael
alan watson #7
Wanna bet if I wrote the kind of things here that they've censored at "the editors" and "WHYS" they'd be censored here too? But I won't. So far they are not relevant to the topics at hand. If they are, I will. I'd rather have the satisfaction of being censored than to have not said anything at all. At least I know I have offended the sensibilities of the censor himself if nothing else. I'll bet Richard Bowen had some choice words about me...off the internet. His letter to me on Wednesday didn't phase me one bit. I'm surprised his was the first one I received. I'm equally sure he didn't like my reply any better.
Michael I meant that very few know how to use html code as you suggest.
11. At 01:54 PM on 31 Mar 2007, alan watson wrote:
Michael I meant that very few know how to use html code as you suggest.
It's quite simple. Below are five sentences with various tags used, bold, italic and bold with italic.
Right click on this page and choose "view source". Scroll down to the sentences below and you will see the 'tags' that were used. Use the same tags in your own posts.
This is a test to demo tags.
This is a test to demo tags
This is a test to demo tags
This is a test to demo tags
This is a test to demo tags
Regards,
Michael
It must be added here that the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has insisted on spending the extra licence fee-payers' money to develop its own blogging software rather than using the many splendid systems that already exist and can be easily customised for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ use on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ websites.
The problems we're seeing here with comments and everything else are typical of first generation in-house software development, which - in this case - is entirely unnecessary and a waste of public funds. I'm sure there is some great reason why Moveable Type or WordPress or LiveJournal or TextPattern were not used by the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, even though they're successfully used by almost all of the widely-read and professional blogs such as Andrew Sullivan and Michelle Malkin.
Meantime we await a fix from the good people whose job it is to do that. No doubt they're hardworking and could use our patience.
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