We were lucky enough to meet some of the folks at KUOW public radio earlier this summer, during their June 30th broadcast about local “neighborhood blogs” (archived here). Looks like we may get a moment or two on their airwaves again this afternoon – for “The Conversation,” they are interviewing one of the country’s best-known political-blog operators, Daily Kos‘s Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, and one of the topics is going to be “anonymous online comments,” which he allows and so do we — as do the majority of websites that enable and encourage discussion. The show is scheduled 1-2 pm (94.9 FM, or listen online) and as one of the people who might provide a “local perspective,” we’ve been told to expect a phone call in the last quarter-hour. (In the meantime, we’ll be busy trying to distill our heartfelt but rambling philosophy into a potential soundbite.) 2:01 PM UPDATE: Clarification for anybody who listened: We would describe our comment policy as “partially moderated” – your comment is held for review if it contains something from a list of words we have programmed into the system, mostly profanity; if it is from an IP address that’s never had a comment approved before (and that can throw regular commenters into the filter all the time); if it has 2 or more URLs, which can be a sign of spam. This site is hit with more than 2,000 spam comments a day — usually horrible nasty mega-X-rated stuff – and our filter keeps all but a fraction of a percent from ever going through, but it does also occasionally, for unknown reasons of technological temperament, throw legitimate comments into, not the moderation queue but the spam basket, which we try to graze quickly at least once daily for such instances — however, we are sure that it’s accidentally eaten a few legitimate comments that we never even saw. Once in a rare while, we turn on “moderate all comments” for a while if the spam filter seems to be acting up, which happened earlier this week, and that may mean a delay in review/approval of your comment.
West Seattle, Washington
19 Monday
| Comments Off on On KUOW this afternoon: A truly hot topic