I’m not fond of not having the ability to include html – and images – in comments.

Plus what you said.

Tngal, you’re right – the editing feature is useful. The downside there is folks can ‘unsay’ not just grammatical missteps, or something truly egregious, but arguments that are powerfully refuted. End state there is, the reader is left with half a conversation.

Five year olds get it – “no takebacksies”. Why should adults get an escape hatch to be less cautious?

there are a lot of good features about Disqus. Moderation is much, much easier using their Moderator’s dashboard. I can view complete comments, not just titles, as they come up and I can see the userid, email address, and IP. One click and I can see entire comment history and ban, if need be.

My objection are 1. total disregard for user privacy in allowing anyone to follow you and you having no recourse and 2. allowing non community members to down rate comments and identify users as spam.

Indeed, in earlier versions of RedState where comments could be edited it was not unknown for people to completely rewrite their arguments once it was obvious they were misquoting policy, history, etc.

what they mean is you could say the moon is green cheese, and when people pile on saying it isn’t green cheese you can go back and change your original comment.

I hate Disqus and only comment through yahoo. On the up side I have saved so much time that I was wasting on commenting to people that have no desire to debate and even think about being open to changing their minds when presented with the facts.

I forgot to add Disqus follows you and keeps information on every site you go to. Who are they selling this info to? I was sick and tired of having my searches follow me wherever I go. it is getting worse all the time. I always log out after every post and use https://www.ixquick.com/ for my searches. This site does not record your IP and searches Google, at least that is what they tell you. How do you really know?
Try using the “Display Collusion Diagram” add-on in Firefox to see what sites are tracking you on every site you go to, it is incredible where your information goes.

Well, we can now post new diaries, but no one can find them…ho hum…we wait…

I know, Mike. I wrote a test diary shortly after Erick announced we could now do so and it sits alone and neglected in cyberspace.

I disagree from a user’s perspective. In fact, I frequent and prefer sites that use Disqus in particular because it makes it easy for comments using a common profile and I don’t have to go through a bunch of setup at each site (even though I was already a RedState member under a different name I switched to a disqus account I use now). Look at the useless comment system over at hotair… ugly list with no way to reply or sort or anything.

Yes, the Disqus system is more open and you are going to get a lot more hit & run comments and trolls, but the upside is the community will begin to recognize the fools if you can put up with the flagging and spamming that will be heavy in an election run-up.

“Yes, the Disqus system is more open and you are going to get a lot more hit & run comments and trolls,”

…which is not acceptable.

If a tree falls in the forest….somewhere, a lib starts crying. Or screams racist. Or something.

But are you even less fond of Labor not in Camel-Not?

http://www.redstate.com/gamecock/2012/09/01/labor-not-in-camel-not/

I have always considered the most negative votes a badge of honor, thus I know I tweaked some liberals keister. I try not to use my full name, never put any personal information on FB and have hidden large rocks in my front yard to rip out the undercharge of anyone that tries to take out my lawn signs. I know my comments will be taken out of context, as this is the price we pay for entering this arena around here. My normal venue is arguing with Marxist college professors and ardent communist protesters, thus my comments may seem a bit odd for those accustomed to preaching to the choir. I know I am surrounded by a “cadre of vicious and stupid gits who think nothing of harassing your employer or SWATting you at home,” I am in W/Mass and it is much worse.

However, I must thank you for pointing out that the rest of the world is not like this yet.

Strieff : My big complaint is that Disqus often refuses to recognize my posts. I have the same problem with every site that uses Disqus.

The only good thing I have noticed is the ability to adjust the font size easily it make it very convenient for my eyes

I want Akin to win just to pee on the legs of the Republican lynch mob. Of course, he is an ignoramus but most politicians are.

??? I have done nothing special on Firefox and Disqus works fine for me. Can you explain by commenting below?

Do you work there or something? That is not a very helpful or insightful comment. Last week our comment system was infinitely better without Disqus. Disqus was implemented to reduce the cost of scaling our commenting base. I’m not convinced that was a good deal.

one would think, right now my sensing is that customer service is of the “I don’t care what you want, this is what you are going to get” variety. Yesterday I brought up what I maintain is a huge breach of user privacy, not being able to block people from “following” you, and was essentially told to FOAD.

I will add a bit to your comment Kowalski if I may. Melody was kind enough to explain how to adjust things on Disqus such as the blue button to the left. I followed her directions only to find I could not change a thing since my username already has a Disqus account. I know who made the account and that person is the loser sea cow who was stalking us all at the old RedState, but other than her stupidity, it irritates me I have no control over features for my account here at RedState.

I’m not fond of the new Disqus, on any site. No ability to flag spam or abuse (there used to be). A feature to vote comments down that gets abused by passive-aggressive lurkers & trolls. No ability to edit (although I can appreciate the counter-points).
Change it back to the old commenting system.
Thanks for letting me vent.

Thanks for the ixquick.com info. I will save it until they have an upgrade for Safari 6.0. I also had Ghostery as an addin to Safari. Last year I read how much all the websites track is in a four part series from the WSJ.

I don’t even understand how this thing is supposed to work. What’s going on with the diaries system? Is there even still a way to recommend diaries now? And why do you have to click on someone’s name to see the diaries they’ve posted?

@redstate-982f409256781f8353ba9e5ec91ebf25:disqus

That’s the price of the ‘free’ web…

Be tracked/trade your info, or start having pay-walls go up on every site…

What frosts my britches is that this is the second time in two presidential elections in a row that we decided to roll out a redesign in the heat of the political season…with the same results….we had one huge disruption after another in the 2008 season which was only corrected by abandoning the new system for yet another system after the freaking election was over…can we not learn from our mistakes? Was it not possible to continue with the site as it was at least till November 6th? Can we count on repeating this circle jerk again in 2016?

The member diaries don’t exist…the last diaries showing up for general consumption was 8/25/2012….I posted to it the member diaries using the “Create new post link and managed to post a diary to my own profile page…but it’s unacceptable to my Red State Bretheren as far as I can tell.

Then there is the abrupt end of a thread I was debating in the other day…there were over 190 something comments in the thread and a few comments from friends that I would have liked to reply to…but suddenly upon surfing to the page by a circuitous convoluted route, the thread that the night before which contained hundreds of comments was empty and my comment that morning was the first of an entirely new thread on a 3 day old font page post.

This sucks and someone should have their head examined for pulling this crap off the weekend before the Republican convention…now the site is crippled, discussion is a crapshoot at best…Red Stater’s ability to network, debate and discuss current events, policy and strategy is dead…we’ve shot ourselves in the foot with 60 days left before the election…and for what???

I have been very grateful to have RS as it is the one place I know I can find the truth. RS is the first thing I read every morning and the last thing I read at night because I have found many kindred spirits here. Change doesn’t bother me much as long as the change works. If I may, I’d like to say making such a big change right before we were heading into the convention was a terrible mistake. I’m sure I’m not the only one who was looking forward to the many new diaries and spirited discussions that would have taken place on the old RS site. Instead, most of the discussion has been side tracked into a discussion on why we all dislike the “upgrade”. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the Obama Chicago minions were behind it! (said with a smile)
I don’t know anything about Disqus or any other blog platform enough to comment on it from a technical point, but I trust Streiff, the other Mods and long-time Red Staters’ concerns about privacy. Personally, I don’t comment at other sites and I hate Facebook, so I don’t know if I should worry about the privacy aspect, so I won’t for now. Instead, I’ll continue to wait and watch and hope for a good resolution.
Hurry Erick, et al! The election will be here all too soon!

Final message to Red State:
http://www.redstate.com/acat/2012/09/02/red-state-we-have-a-problem/
‎

Mew

Erick Erickson will go down as the man who killed RedState in a crucial election year unless he immediately goes back to the old system. We are not talking about design glitches but a complete conceptual failure at the design level.

The voting system is childish, at best.

You’ve got four down votes. They mean nothing and are mean-spirited. Probably registered by Dem trolls. Might as well have been registered by six-year-olds for all they signify.

I have some thoughts.

First, I should note that I have been ill since this version of RS went live, and as a former and not current member of staff, I have no particular thought on the redesign as a matter of personal policy. I should note, however, that I do find it more aesthetically appealing and easier to navigate, which may be warning flags, because I really liked RedState’s look in 2004-2005.

Second, however, I am not impressed with Disqus as a commenting system here for two reasons and two reasons only. streiff has alluded to the first, but I’d like to offer the second as well.

(1) As someone who was here when the lights first went on, I remember very well the Scoop system we used for everything. Comments in Scoops could be up- or down-rated, a feature Josh had employed at Tacitus and the inmates at dKos used and likely still use today. The upside to this is the ability to say, hey, great work, something the legacy of which one might still see today in comments that include a stand-alone “5″ to indicate “well done” or “I agree with this” or both.

The downside, aside from the herd mentality that necessarily follows, is that really good comments that some idiot trolls don’t like — or more usually, comments by users whom some idiot trolls don’t like — get down-rated out of existence. We went through several custom tweaks of the Scoop commenting system, from eliminating zeroes to making it impossible to troll a comment out of existence to giving rating power only to trusted users, before finally getting rid of the system altogether.

Ah, 2005.

I mention this because as I scroll down the comments here I see a ridiculous number of down-ratings given to perfectly legitimate or innocuous comments. The two possibilities are system glitches with Disqus and obsessive trolling. Disqus has had problems in the past, but I rather suspect that the issue is not computer software based.

This will inevitably — and I say this from long experience — damage commenting and community involvement. Perhaps ridiculously, perhaps by God’s will, perhaps by evolutionary necessity, humans are social animals. Being told you’re an idiot by having a 3:1 down-rating for speaking your mind respectfully will shame many and drive them away.

We lost a lot of good users before abolishing the rating system.

I say this without intending presumption. I merely note how all of this worked before.

(2) The absence of titles from Disqus — or at least this iteration — is not helpful from a moderation standpoint or from the feeling of community for which RedState is well-known. I say this not only because of my tendency to use titles to begin the snark, but also because they serve as organizing principles for comments as a whole, leading to better dialogue.

That’s my opinion, anyway.

I would add a last point, for everyone threatening to take their toys and leave. Erick is a friend, as are most of the people involved in this, and part of why I count them as friends is because I have so very much respect for them. Although I stress that I have no communicated with them on these issues — this has been the sickest week I’ve had in well over a decade — but I guarantee that they have elicited feedback not to torment you but to find out what’s going on here.

Leave your comments, be respectful, and give them some time. Most of them do this for free and treat this seriously. The ones who get paid to do this are no less serious. Show them the decency they’ve showed you.

Along the same lines as your concern re: up or down votes and its effect on the sense of community, I say, “It’s the anonymity, stupid.” IOW, an anonymous vote one way or the other means little to nothing at all in the sometimes vicious world of politics.

In the same vein, with the old system, it took courage to “reco” a diary when the issue at hand was controversial because the system published the username of the one recommending. And I loved that. It was one more way to make ourselves known to the community by taking responsibility for our positions on relevant issues.

As far as taking my toys and going home, I am already at home…here, at RedState. RedState is my political, spiritual, and social community and — like any other family — evokes a sense of loyalty and devotion from me. I am barely getting my feet wet in the world of politics and I need RedState to help me carry on and finish growing up.

I truly hope and pray that the RS powers that be make the right decisions and, if necessary, corrections, going forward to protect the integrity of everything RS stands for. I will be praying for them to have the wisdom and courage to do the right things for all of our sakes.

I hope you are better now. Thank you for trying to calm us down, it’s infectious. One of us panics and now everyone is in an uproar.

I would kowalski (another downside of no titles is the inability to include this as a subject line). The jump feature from the comment box on the front — which appears to experience an incredible lag — is either broken or non-responsive. Clicking on the comment — which demonstrates a jump URL — just brings me to the top of the thread.

My box is a year and a half old, but I’m running Windows7 patched up and the most recent Firefox build, so I think the issue is with Disqus or the system as a whole.

I see I also spelled “Scoop” with more than one s above. Perhaps it’s time to lie back down.

Nope. But there are upsides and downsides to having a large brood.

CarolT, except for the ones that drifted somewhere into Cyberspace. I posted what I thought was a logical and thoughtful comment that addressed some issues that has disappeared. There were a few early conversations that seem have gone into a black hole as well.

Thomas, please correct me if I’m wrong but I discovered RS in the summer of 2008. I had to request to become a member and then I was accepted the next day and I could comment. Moe was very welcoming, he told me to write a little about myself etc.
Now it looks like anyone with a Disqus account can register and just log in. Am I remembering another website where I had to be accepted? I could swear it was RS. Thank you, Carol

Acat – I mostly lurk here and have for several years, but on any thread, I seek out your comments because they are witty, insightful, and savvy.

let’s put it this way, you wouldn’t know if I left RedState, but a whole lot of folks like me will absolutely miss you.

I’m flat out horrified that the other regulars in this thread also are in various stages of leaving… all over an unforced error in an upgrade.

Among my friends I am the most knowledgeable on current events and political stuff… but I come here and am humbled by those who have been in this fight far longer or are just plain smarter than I at connecting the dots.

RedState, as all here have been expressing, is a unique and wonderful community, indispensable at this critical time in our nation’s history.

To those who have a say in the site’s operation… I say FIX THIS before irreplaceable voices like Acat are gone for good (hint: I hope you come back). Whatever you were shooting for in changing the structure of the diaries or your reasons for choosing Disqus, the result is that the benefits clearly do not out weigh the costs in the experience of the community. You don’t have people posting here saying, “Thank goodness for the new RedState, now I’ll FINALLY be willing to comment here…” Instead, you’re losing people who have made RedState what it is… and the ‘customer’ is always right (right?).

To those who are part of this community… I hope we have not grown so frustrated by the issues surrounding this site upgrade that we lose sight of what really matters… that we remain a community dedicated to the cause most dear to us… saving our country by staying connected in places like RedState.

If I had a vote, I would ask that Acat and the others here who are departing too numerous for me to name, even if your patience is exhausted or if your concerns are too great to stay right now… do return keep open the possibility that some day you might return.

I greatly admire all of you… and this place won’t be the same without you.

I, too, enjoyed the diaries immensely — different takes, different people, different opinions — that what made this site great. and hope they fix the problem with the diaries soon. I can create a post, and you can read my post if you click on my name, but you *still* can’t access it any other way. Let’s fix this bug and then make the diaries more central to RS like it was with the old design.
I also detest Disqus for all the insecurities that people have expressed below. Off with its head!.

Yep. I reported on this a few days ago when it was announced we could “post” again. Still no changes. You can’t ready anything new except for “front pagers” and you can’t recommend, share, whatever. Nothing updates.

Not sure castigating Erick is the way to go kipling. Yes the system sux and we are without the joy of our beloved RS as we once knew. (sheds tear) But I don’t believe Erick could make the decision to do this all on his own. Surely others had a hand in it somewhere. To put the blame squarely on him is not fair.

For what it’s worth… I’ve read in other posts that this upgrade is still a work in progress. I think that it is those who leave that actually would risk killing Redstate, simply by their absence, which is not meant to denigrate their leaving, but merely to describe a cause and effect fact.

For my part, I hope that the folks working on this are trying to resolve the concerns of those who are considering leaving so that in the coming days and weeks we can through this as a community and bitch in a good natured way about the upgrade fiasco of 2012… for years to come.

That said, I don’t believe Erick Erickson has sole authority over the changes, nor sole ability to resolve them… and on that basis I disagree with your assignment of sole blame to Erick.

I hope that the frustrations, however legitimate, don’t ruin this community and that is up to us… and I hope ‘management’ is taking notes on what needs to get fixed… and communicates efforts in progress to reassure folks like Kipling and the rest of us that concerns are being addressed.

You nailed it CarolT… A crisis is a terrible time to panic.

wcp, I just posted a long reply and just as I was about to post, it disappeared. Short version is I agree with you about recommending diaries. Kinda forced you to stand up for your convictions, didn’t it?

That is correct. There is still a RS id “behind” (or maybe “in front of”) the Disqus ID. And for those like me who have a permanent Disqus ID, there is not necessarily a link between them. As I discovered, if you use the same email address on RS as your Disqus ID AND on any other Disqus ID, it’s possible to link/merge them. I did, but I had already established (prematurely, as it turns out) a Disqus ID just for Redstate.

For those without a Disqus ID, one was created behind the scenes to allow you to sign on and comment with your original RS ID and password. Was that a good decision? I suppose that’s a matter of opinion. It did allow people to immediately sign in and comment, but I’m not sure about the wisdom of doing this, given how Disqus appears to work across sites. I suspect that is an unintended and probably unanticipated consequence of using their service.

I just had two comments of mine disappear today… first time I’ve seen that happen. More weird, one of my comments doesn’t show up in the aggregation of my comments when I click on my ID, but is still on the comment thread where I posted it today. So it looks to me like there are clearly some glitches in comment history management.

Mr. Crown, I’ve used Disqus only recently and rather sparingly before the switch here. I made a long comment on RMJ’s Back to School Blues diary that they apparently found after I mentioned it had disappeared. Then I made a long comment on one of the “tell us what you think diaries” which is gone (to which one of the mods responded).

FWIW, I use Firefox here at home. We use IE8 at work and I can’t get the new redstate version to work properly with it. Thankfully, I downloaded a version of Firefox to my desktop at work, so I can get around that unless it gets to the point it won’t work because I can’t update it since they tightened up our permissions to the non-tech staff.

Please someone explain for me–what is a follower? Why do I have one? Where and who are they? And how do I kill it? I know on twitter you have to allow followers. I am not a member of disqus ( at least I hope I’m not) I didn’t sign up for it. I’m just using my rs sign-in username and password. In the “my disqus” thing, it says someone is following me. STOP IT! Get your nose away from me this instant. Git. Shoo.

I now have three of them, tngal, and they give me the creeps.

kowalski…primarily because I don’t know who they are and whether they are friends or foes.

I’ll earn you “followers”

wcp, I think I’m one. I started exploring all the buttons and links, etc. when this thing launched and followed a few of the folks whose comments I didn’t want to miss, especially with the difficulty of the comment thread now. Honestly, I’m not sure if it’s the “follow” feature or something else, but I get an email when you respond to one of my comments. I just haven’t bothered to unfollow anyone, but I don’t want to give anyone the creeps, either. LOL.

tngal, you have to do more than click on someone’s name to “follow” them. After you click on someone’s name, there is a “follow” button to the far right side of the box. You have to click on that to follow someone and it would be pretty hard to do inadvertently.

Invitation for Diary Entries…Come to my website!

I want to invite any RedState Users to go to my website and send me your diary entries that you would post on RedState if you could: http://llphsecondrevolution.wordpress.com/

Until the problem with the diaries is fixed, I am willing to make my website available for diary entries. Simply click on the contact link, and send me an e-mail of your diary entry: http://llphsecondrevolution.wordpress.com/contact/

I will gladly post it on my website (be sure to include your name or nickname so I can give you credit).

I hope RedState will soon get this problem fixed because I love RedState. But until they do, RedState users have so many valuable ideas that aren’t getting posted or seen, and I want to offer up my website as a place for diary entries.

Thanks…start sending them to me! —Spoa

Amen
nt

Right on.

More to the point: The question is, to quote Hamlet, to be or not to be.

To be a place of free-flowing interchange?

Or to be a place of regulated input?

To be or not to be?

It’s real simple. What do the masters intend? If they intend good, patience is warranted. If they do not intend good…every person for himself or herself.

I’d like to be able to block followers.

Why is that streiff…? So you can always have the last word? Where is the fun in that?

I’ve never been stalked.

Wouldn’t bother me.

I’d be ok just being able to selectively block (“unfollow”) them. But I’d not be opposed to an across the board block.

It involves jack daniels bbq sauce. I make my own, not the bottled stuff.

“I make my own…” is why you’re a welcome follower.

Spent lots of time around both Memphis and Nashville. Always came home smelling like BBQ.

tngal, my husband has always been a long-time fan of Dreamland BBQ – original in Tuscaloosa. Sauce is more mustard and vinegar, less tomato/ketchup. Recently, I brought home a bottle that one of my uncles in TN stirs up at home. It’s very similar to Dreamland’s, but he had to admit it’s a little better. The homemade stuff is almost always better.

Wouldn’t miss it for the world.

BBQ is real “American Food!” because it’s enjoyed everywhere and every region – and area within the region – has it’s own basic recipe with lots of tuning at every street corner.

I love BBQ! Pretty much won’t buy a steak in a restaurant, but I’ll drive forever for BBQ.

I am sad that Red State isn’t Red State anymore. And I accidentally gave myself a bad mark.

I need to apologize to some of you here at RS. Was feeling lonely and wanted to connect up with a few of you that I’ve been commenting, or debating with and figured out how to us the Disqus follow. After considering things and reading dozens of posts I realize that was not a very polite thing to do. I’m sorry. If you know me and follow me that’s great but the point that people can go into stalking mode startled me. As my husband says, I’m just too naive. I only “followed” those I’ve talked with before but once I figure out how to unfollow will do so and then ask first! I can’t figure out if it is possible to see who is following you.

I really like Disqus. I am a programmer and I have used it on several sites. I guess I don’t really know what you mean by privacy since you don’t have to have your real name associated with your disqus account if you don’t want to.

If ratings are a problem you could disable them. The threading on the old site was terrible. Let’s give Disqus a chance! It seems like every news site out there is using it so it works for me.

People just complain whenever any site does a new rollout. I am a web developer and this is always the case. It just takes time to get used to.

I don’t mind the new version but I actually found something strangely lovable about the hokieness of the old one… plus, yeah– Disqus sucks pretty badly… might want to get rid of it.

This thing kind of reminds me of “the new Coca-Cola” that wound up crashing and burning… the old one wasn’t broken.

No harm done as far as I’m concerned, emptybucket. It’s not the folks I trust that’s the problem. It’s the ones I don’t know.

Don’t know much about the general topic, but what you wrote makes a lot of sense.

It’s slow as molasses for me in Firefox, so I switched over to Safari. Also, I can widen my view to fill my wide screen.

Still, I wouldn’t have even been aware of any reduction of security if it hadn’t been discussed in this thread.

I wonder why you have 8 “down arrows.” Looks like summertime and the trolling is easy.

There are a whole lot of ‘down arrows’ all over Red State comments, lately.

I guess not all can appreciate the absolute artistry in my Avatar. That, or a hoard of Huffpo goons are bored out of their minds by their own convention and are killing time over here.

I have to agree that the new site is better in some ways (but too bright) but lacking in many ways particularly with the DisKus(ting) commenting section.

I lurk here quite a bit, too (going back well before 2008) but registered only recently. The Mod’s firm conviction to toss out any scalawags who post without thinking or constantly complaining is great (REAL moderating on the internet – now that was something new to me!) and shows the conviction to stay within the debate that is framed in the Diaries or post and toss out on their ear those who cannot OR will not follow the rules of engagement, so to speak.

I didn’t register sooner because the old system would not let me edit a post (for clarity) as I have been rightfully accused of having ‘happy fingers’ when it comes to writing more than three sentences along a single train of thought (my excessive use of parenthetical phrases should bear witness to the multiple tangents my mind can follow in any given nanosecond).

I also will add my “555555″ to all the others and say “Thank You” to Erick E. and all who put their time into RedState to help educate me and other like-minded souls. I loved being able to know, as someone stated in an earlier comment in this thread, the ‘pulse’ of the conservative community is on any given day. That alone is VERY encouraging. Knowing that there are many others who share my opinions keeps me willing AND informed enough to fight the good fight.

My biggest issue is one noted earlier about the lack of privacy but also another aspect that can be as sinister if left unchecked. Let me flesh it out a bit; I read voraciously and always have (drives the Missus J. nuts!) and on many sites that use this underwhelming posting system, I would simply post as “guest” to keep from being ‘followed’ (‘stalked’ is a far more accurate term). Here, I had no such fear but let me relate this in no uncertain terms, with the Disqus platform I can easily make it seem like there is a much larger number that agree (or disagree) with a given posting or comment and can easily skew the “Vote Up or down” by logging in with a new id and a ‘burn’ email account (Disqus only asks once to verify through email confirmation), post a comment, log off, log BACK in under ID #2, post a reply and vote my original comment up (or ‘down’ if the meds are not working – just kidding!).

If this can be done once it can be done twice or even thrice. Disqus does not ‘care’ if you don’t want to merge several concurrent ID’s – it simply gives you the option and then decides FOR YOU which is the ‘primary’ ID – as Wubbles World has also pointed out in another post’s comments thread. To make the troll scam work, simply choose NOT to merge the ID’s. It will only ask to merge those accounts that have been registered with a unique email address.

Say for example; I wanted to troll a board (and yes, we do seem to have had a rather large increase since the roll-out on the new platform), I can create as many additional ID’s as I’d like to create, post/vote and and make the voting up or down totally meaningless or start a flame war using two different ID’s on two different devices (my desktop and my iPad for instance). If we think for one minute that those who disagree with us have NOT figured this out, please rest assured, If I can create a new ID on Disqus to post a response on the Daily Caller website and the CBS San Fran (mainly so I would not be ‘swatted’ or harassed), I have little doubt that it is NOT being done by paid trolls. This was discovered when I had been logged into Disqus under a merged account, and found that I could vote up my own comment! I am not ethically challenged so I clicked the vote down link to remove the up vote. Those of a socialist/statist bent will have little if any concern about the ethics involved (which is not news to anyone with two brain cells to
rub together…)

MODS: if folks there are aware of this (and I’m ‘letting the cat out of the bag’): please delete/edit this posting. I will understand. If anyone at RS needs or wishes to
contact me regarding this, I will gladly give them the different screen names used for verification and sharing with the developers/back-end staff.
All should have the same IP address, but as my ISP uses dynamic IP addressing, that
is only conjecture and not fact.

Edited to note: I CAN indeed vote my OWN comment up or down (that’s my up vote below). That’s broken for sure…

Yes. The arrows are irrelevant, other than as indicators of agreement or disagreement, anyway. When applied to an explanatory or simply innocuous comment, they tell us only that somebody likes to hit the arrow button.

However, posting new comments before older ones is really confusing, as this series indicates.

I read cat’s final message…. The top comment (right now) is from proudmarinemom, and I quote: “This was the only blog worth a sh*t. Michele Malkin has not allowed registration at her site in years and it’s the same snarky commentators on every thread. Town Hall is full of trolls. NRO and Politico– seriously? Even RCP and WSJ have too many nuts and the mods never police them. This site had some prestige in that profanity and leftist propaganda never made it past the ban hammer.

Of all the times in this nation’s history for good people to feel they have no place to go to reload for the battle, this has to be the worst.”

I think she makes a great point. RS has been the premier conservative blog on the web NOT RUN BY A BIG NAME OR A BIG CORPORATION, one where we could pretend we were in with the big boys. Heck, I often came up with ideas that appeared later in the popular media. Sometimes I even made it to print before they did.

As such, we had a feeling that we were making a difference when we spent as much as a full day writing and editing a diary to post here (unpaid, of course). We felt that other conservatives would read it, and we had some confidence that some of what we wrote had at least a CHANCE to make a difference somewhere, someday. That was partly because our diaries got published and had a chance to get extended exposure by making the “Recommended” list.

Anyway, RS is still the only game in town with SOME of these characteristics. I’ll probably stay around–after about seven years it’s hard to cast off. For the first time, I missed the RS Gathering this year–I also missed any stories about it on RS. What was with that?

The ambiance seems to be different now, but I’ll give it a chance.

I see you got no responses. I think some earlier comments were garbled by the system. I found some from Gamecock on my profile. Maybe better now???

Agree entirely w/DISQUS issues!

It was clearly not well-loved.