Andrew Bolts Blog Bingo

I like Andrew Bolts editorials and he also posts good stuff to his blog.

That said I don't agree with everything he says. 

Unfortunately, the overall quality of his posts aside, I find that the commenting facility that is attached to his blog is highly flawed.

The main problem is the moderation.

Now I've posted to moderated forums before, I know the drill. Don't be abusive. Don't say things that are legally ambiguous. Defamation is definitely unacceptable.

It's not rocket science.

However on Bolts blog you can meticulously spend 10 minutes crafting a coherent and incisive post that has no chance of being abusive or legally dangerous only to find that it simply never gets approved.

There seems to be no logic whatsoever, although I have noted that even mentioning the moderation in any way is a guaranteed one way trip to /dev/null for that post.

Even when posts do get approved it can be several hours later.

On the other hand Bolts resident trolls (every forum has them) including  "Mr Jordan", "steiner", "reco" & "Ross from Woy Woy" all seem to get their obnoxious and inane garbage posted regularly and reliably.

But then again maybe they are all just unemployed bums who post constantly and the 20 percent of their dribble that actually makes it past the moderators just looks out of proportion to those who post maybe one or two times a day.

I don't know.

But then you take a look at Piers Akermans blog at the Daily Telegraph. Piers doesn't post as often as AB, but he seems much more proactive when it comes to approving posts. An hour or two for approval is still too much but it is also far better than the 6 - 12 hours it seems to take on Bolts blog, if you are lucky enough to make the cut at all.




His post for today is up to 336 comments at the time of writing which is about three to six times the number of comments that Andrew gets for any particular story, albeit with some exceptions.

Over 400 comments for that last post is impressive, but a huge proportion of those comments took over 24 hours to before they appeared online.

With such a huge lag time it is simply impossible to actually have a discussion and commenting simply becomes a fire and forget process with no feeling of engagement whatsoever.

Now, I realise that Andrew Bolt is hitting 3M page impressions per month now so the moderation load must be pretty high, but this is why forums across the Internet are now moving away from manually moderating forums and more to a self moderating approach.

Consider the UK tech blog "The Register". For years their comment section was a fully moderated style and posts could take more than 12 hours to appear for international contributors, even more for those posting from different time zones.

Then, about 2 years ago they updated their forum.

Posts now appear instantly and were accompanied by a "Report this" button.

A set of rules were announced stating that if reported (and the report was found to be justified)  you would be placed on a moderation list for a period of time.

As well, new signups were automatically placed on that same moderation list.

Long term posters were given freedom to post unmoderated under the understanding that were they to abuse their freedom they would be first put on the restricted list and repeated abuse would result in a permaban.

As far as I know it has been working fine since then.

If you are not a techy/geek. you could be forgiven for thinking that since it is just a tech blog, it's not likely to be infested with abusive trolls and  the like.

Well, if you think that then I invite you to think again. The site regularly publishes climate change articles of the skeptical variety, articles regarding race and gender studies as relating to the IT industry and other not quite politically correct stories and editorials.

On top of that, anybody that has any experience in the tech sphere will tell you, there are no hotter flamewars fought than over subjects such as Microsoft vs Linux, XBox vs PlayStation or even AMD vs Intel.

In all these areas highly excitable fanboys abound.

Yet even in such a hotbed of dispute their self moderation policy seems to work fine.

It's a pity Bolts blog is still stuck in the previous century then because I sure would like a more responsive forum to discuss the current gang of neer-do-wells that are currently infesting Canberra.     

Maybe if he had better moderation then perhaps he could hit 5 million impressions per month?

Then I could discuss why newspapers are so bad at putting advertising on their websites (and subsequent blogs) necessitating them putting up idiotic paywalls to make money instead.

C.S. Lewis quote

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Julia Marries The Government

Julia Marries The Government

This is nothing new, it is a deliberate strategy of those who crave bigger, more intrusive governments.

Since the dawn of time the family unit hes evolved as mechanism to protect and preserve those people who are genetically close to each other.

The trouble for those who want to continually grow governments is that a close knit family is remarkably self sufficient and therefore independent.

This is less than ideal.

First the extended families became a thing of the past.

Prior to the industrial revolution, families were centered around the home, which as often as not was the same place where the family income was derived. Think farms, traders/shopkeepers and tradesmen/craftsmen. With the arrival of the industrial revolution two things happened.

People became more dependent on an employer. We started to have "jobs".

Later, it became easier to travel longer distances due to technology advances which enabled younger people to relocate to where greater job opportunities were located.

It was the beginning of the end for extended families, although it has to be said changes up to this point were due to societal and technological changes rather than social engineering by policy.

After the rise of the profession of "Psychiatry" people in power began to turn to this new "science" to find ways that they can understand how people think.

This later evolved into a desire to understand how people may be manipulated, and then controlled.

Since the seventies the so called "Nuclear family" was identified as a social mechanism that still provided too much independence to people, and if that could be broken up then society could be broken down into its component individuals, half of which would be totally dependent on government and the other half being harnessed to pay for it.

The radical feminism of the 70's was used as a vehicle to deliver "No fault divorce".

Soon after that came alimony, and then "child support"

Today, it is financially advantageous for women to relegate the fathers of their children to a mere income source with the inconvenience of fortnightly visits regarded as a necessary evil.

Now, many men have no say over how their children are raised while their mendacious ex-wives use there own children as a meal ticket and often also as a weapon of spite.

It is no accident that divorce rates are at historical highs and it is a deliberate strategy of Socialists whose goal is to make every citizen either fully dependent on government or or an indentured servant tasked with paying for it all.

The only surprise with this Democrat advertisement is that the Socialists appear comfortable enough with what they are doing that they are no longer concerned with hiding it.

Also posted as a comment on Andrew Bolts blog, let's see if it gets past his Nazi moderators.