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Why you now need to login to post comments…

When I started this particular site in 1999 it was one of only a few hundred active personal weblogs in the world. Every time a new interesting site was discovered, everyone in the community linked to them. I met a lot of really nice and intelligent people in that early community, many of whom I’m still friends with. I mention this to demonstrate that it was possible to have a community of people who liked and got on with one another, communicating primarily through their sites but doing so completely without the benefit of blog comments systems.

I feel like my grandfather when I lurch into language like this, but in those days when people wanted to respond to someone else’s post, they wrote something on their own sites and stuck in a link. In many ways I think that we should have stuck with that way of handling communication through webloggia, that we should have dug around and find new ways to optimise that process (√° la Technorati), but when I look online today it’s not where we find ourselves. One way or another we have to make do and work to improve the environment in which we find ourselves.

The first systems I saw which allowed people to comment on blog posts were completely orthogonal to the blog posting services themselves. Sites like Haloscan were support crews for installations primarily built on top of Blogger. A link on the individual weblog entry would trigger a pop-up that was hosted in an entirely different place. Comments and posts weren’t stored in the same databases–sometimes they weren’t even stored on the same continents. And because they were held so distinctly, and because weblogs were so new, they weren’t exactly highly evolved bits of technology.

But still–even then–no message board would have allowed someone to start posting without a registration process or e-mail confirmations. These approaches were (and remain) some of the best ways to weed out the casually abusive. So why weren’t these features on blogs? Because many people’s interactions with a particular site were often desperately slight. You might find yourself visiting dozens of sites in a day. Some of those sites you might want to respond to, but you’d probably never visit again. The overhead for signing up with each one was just too substantial. So these comment systems kept themselves for the most part open and vulnerable, and simply hoped for the best. And for a time, everything was fine.

I switched my site to Movable Type fairly late in the game compared to other people in the community. The big selling point at the time was built-in comments and an individual page per post. I understood the attraction of the individual pages, but was far from convinced about comments. When I first turned them on, it felt very strange indeed. It felt as if I were opening up my home so that other people could come in and draw on the walls. And some people drew very rude things indeed. But on the whole the things were people’s opinions, they put effort into writing them and I had to respect that at least.

I think for me the real turning point was when the slow trickle of spam that had been coming into many MT sites for a while turning into a torrent of Trackback abuse, and I felt that it had got so bad I was forced to turn the whole mechanism off: Trackback is dead. Are comments dead too?. Trackback is still around a bit today in some forms on some sites, but for the most part once the spammers figured out that it meant that you could easily infect other people’s sites with links to your viagra-farm they leapt into action like a vampire spotting a ripe young neck. I don’t want to be mean to Six Apart here. MT was the most vulnerable to this kind of behaviour, because MT had pioneered the standard. A lovely idea crumbled under the weight of vicious cynicism from a few dozen vampires.

And then the comments. The dominance of a few key platforms meant that it was now possible to automate comment posting at a tremendous scale. I ended up getting a dedicated server at pair.com to host plasticbag.org and barbelith, convinced that the popular online community was causing everything else to slow down. Instead it turned out to be continual fake comments coming into plasticbag.org several times a second, talking about mother/daughter incest and bestiality. I ran to the people who developed anti-spam measures and installed MT-Blacklist and did everything I could, and still to this day–even with many tens of thousands of spam-comments automatically blocked–I need to plough through forty or fifty spam posts a day. Hundreds of thousands of comments have been spammed without me even seeing them, but still the ones that get through have lowered my opinion of humanity quite significantly.

It’s for these reasons that I’ve decided to do what maybe I should have done years ago – switch from allowing anonymous and blog-style comments through to requiring that people sign up before they post. And this is possible because of a range of new services that make the need to ‘sign-up’ everywhere less of an issue. From now on you’ll need to be registered using OpenID, Vox, Livejournal or Typekey to post a comment to plasticbag.org. They’re all services that have originated with SixApart, the same people who came up with Movable Type in the first place. Of all of them OpenID is the most open and the most interesting, in that anyone can host an Open ID service and you can sign in using those services to an Open ID enabled site in the world. The old problems of overhead have semi-evaporated and that’s why I feel I’m able to take the risk and make leaving a comment just that little bit harder. Hopefully I won’t put too many of you off.

I’ve done this finally because I’m trying to fight to win back my site. I want to recover the pleasure I used to get from the place, a pleasure that has been despoiled by cynical, money-grubbing bastards. It’s part of a process of working out why I’ve stopped playing in this glorious communal space and looking at how I can fix it rather than putting up with it. Stage one is fixing the comments problem. For a few months at least–until the spammers catch up–I’m not going to spend any time each day looking at people trying to sell men dreams of fantastically terrifying erections. I can barely cope with how happy that makes me.

After that I’m going to look at another problem that’s been stopping me from enjoying myself online – people who think my voice is for sale, and that my site is nothing more or less than a ‘vehicle for their messaging’. That’s going to have to stop too, and I’ll be writing about it shortly. In the meantime you can get a sense of my current mood on the thread surrounding this Flickr picture. In a nutshell, this is not a brothel – there are no prostitutes here.

And what can you do? You can reassure me by checking that the new comments stuff works. I’ve still got a few things around error messages and preview screens that at the moment are completely broken, but I need to know that in the meantime there aren’t any major ways that you would like to post that just don’t work. And I’d like to hear how you have dealt with your own spam problems on your own sites, and how spam has affected your writing and your blog. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

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General Notices

Comments are working again…

A few of you contacted me via Twitter, work e-mail, personal e-mail, instant messanging (Yahoo and AOL), SMS, phone call and in person to remind me that my comments weren’t working on plasticbag.org. Thank you all very very much for your help in bringing it to my attention! For the first time in quite a long while I’ve got my head above water for a couple of days, and I’ve managed to get a very very quick and dirty version working already this morning, and I’ll now as soon as I’ve had a shower, I’ll spend the next couple of hours making everything a little smoother and more elegant! However, if you really did have something that you needed to get off your chest, knock yourselves out!

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General Notices

Evil spammers using plasticbag.org addresses…

Given the three thousand odd bounced e-mails I’ve received this morning purporting to have been originally sent from various names @plasticbag.org, I’m guessing that my domain has been chosen by spammers as a particularly amusing return-path address. If any of the people who visit my site are receiving spam from @plasticbag.org addresses, can I say in public that I’m not responsible for the irritation that you’re suffering and that I’m suffering many orders of magnitude more irritation from it than you probably are. However, I am genuinely sorry for the pain this is causing you, and if anyone knows whether there is anything practical that I can do about it, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a note in the comments. Thanks again.

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General Notices

A quick note on comments…

I just thought I should mention that because of the ever-escalating amount of comment spam I’m getting on plasticbag.org nowadays, I’ve decided to make it the default behaviour to not publish them immediately on the site. If you’re a Typekey user, then you get a free pass – your comments will appear on the site immediately – but otherwise I’m afraid every single comment is going to get individually checked by me before it goes up. I’d really rather this wasn’t the case for a whole bunch of reasons (including my possible increased liability to legal threat) but I’m not comfortable any more having mother/daughter incest, bestiality and teen slut links on my site as a matter of course. So I’m cutting them off. It’ll mean a bit more work for me, and a less dynamic and exciting site, but I can’t really think of another solution that doesn’t end up being an ever-escalating arms race. You can read my earlier thoughts around this territory in this old post of mine: Trackback is Dead – Are Comments Dead Too?

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General Notices

A brief note about deleting comments…

I try to be pretty reasonable with the comments on my site – other than spam it’s a rare day when I delete a comment that someone has posted. But recently, I’ve been getting some stuff posted anonymously that want to take issue in the stongest terms with decisions I’ve been making in my life and which are full of the most aggressive insults and frankly I’ve had enough of it. I have astonished myself by deciding not to delete the vast majority of them, and I have decided that I’m actually quite comfortable to have conversations with these people (although maybe not in public) to try and break their impression of me as a cartoon villain, even though I suspect the perpetrators to be less interested in persuading me of their position than to use any ammunition at their disposal to take a swing at me. So from now on, if you’re going to abuse me and you wish to do so anonymously and without allowing me a way to respond to you, then I’m afraid you may find your comments deleted without any warning. Insulting people anonymously is just cowardly and I don’t have to put up with it.