Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Quick admin note: gang, how hard is it to notice the moderation alert?

Matt's post today is getting a lot of responses, but it would appear some commenters aren't reading the notice that comment moderation is on, nor are they noticing the window that pops up after leaving your comment, informing you that comment moderation is on, and that it will appear on the original post after it has been approved by an admin. Considering that these notices are all but accompanied by a parade of elephants and a 40-piece brass band, I find the phenomenon curious. But still, today one guy submitted his comment no fewer than seven times, and another at least four. While it's no trouble to delete the extras in the queue, still, among intelligent adults I really don't feel like I should have to remind people to read the notices.

Moderation has been more or less permanently activated due to the activity of trolls like Dennis Markuze/David Mabus (who's still around) and the rise in Asian porn spam (not even good porn either!) that is the inevitable consequence of our increasing readership. It has not been activated to censor views we do not like, including Christian views. So if you don't see your comment right away, please, don't keep clicking the button like a monkey with Down's Syndrome going "Why not it work?" It is working. Don't panic. Okay? So: group hug! Now, thank you all for reading and participating here, and we return you to your regularly scheduled blasphemy.

18 comments:

  1. Wait a minute. What did you just say?

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  2. Surely you jest! I can't believe anyone is absent-minded enough to submit their message multiple times!

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  3. Surely you jest! I can't believe anyone is absent-minded enough to submit their message multiple times!

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  4. I see what you did there.

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  5. I see what you did there.

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  6. I see what you did there.

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  7. I see what you did there.

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  8. I can't speak for anyone else, but I got a weird error page when I submitted my comment on Tracie's post. I hit the back button, which resubmitted the information, and got the moderation note at the top of the page. But, since I'm using Firefox, my original comment text was all still in the comment box. I didn't actually know if the comment had gone through, so I figured I could always check later to see if it had or submit it again.

    So, if that's a common problem, I might see where people might not take the patient last step I took, and instead resubmit.

    On the other hand, it might just be a case of "fuckin' Internets, how do they work?!"

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  9. TO be fair Martin, there seems to be a glitch or something in google/blogger occasionally where a URL is bounced back as "too large" but the post is put through anyway. It might not be intentional

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  10. I actually had not noticed a glitch on my end, so if that's what's hanging a lot of people up, it's helpful to know. I have noticed Blogger being generally slow to load, but I figured that's just Google. A glitch that compels people to resubmit a comment as many as seven times seems extraordinarily severe.

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  11. As a reader who recently posted a comment three or four times (though to an earlier post), I apologize for my impatient spammosity.

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  12. "So if you don't see your comment right away, please, don't keep clicking the button like a monkey with Down's Syndrome going "Why not it work?" "

    Wow. That is offensive in so many ways.

    I like it. ;)

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  13. Robin: Well, as has been pointed out, some folks may have been caught in some bizarre Blogger glitch that was telling them their comments weren't being saved when they actually were. That kind of thing is beyond our control and certainly doesn't mean anyone apart from Google is being stupid. But yes, I am glad most of you seem to have picked up on the fact my tone was all my usual non-PC snark and not any actual derision.

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  14. Speaking as a sysadmin with years of experience, I know that users don't read notices. If I were to give it a name, I'd probably call it "motd blindness".

    At one site that I worked, we brought the main server down for backups at 7:00 on Saturday, every single week. Every Friday we'd start putting up big obnoxious notices when anyone logged in reminding them of this. Before shutting the machine down, we'd send multiple reminders directly to people's terminals. And when the machine came up, we announced it on the PA.

    And yet, the first time it was my turn to do backups, as soon as I had brought the machine down, someone came up and asked me why it was down.

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  15. Spammosity - added to dictionary; 2 thumbs up to Robin.

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  16. I was one of those who encountered a posting glitch yesterday, so I am likely included in this.

    Sorry.

    I'll go ahead and submit this fourteen times now.

    ReplyDelete

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