Don’t be shy. I’m not mad at you, but I would like to know who an anonymous poster on Def-Con News is because every month I have to manually delete hundreds of your posts that end up in the moderation folder. Perhaps we can even figure out why this is happening.
Each month, without fail, the moderation folder fills up with comments posted by someone who goes by the handle “Anonymous.” Here’s what is going on today:
There were zero comments in moderation yesterday.
These posts are always from older articles and they don’t seem like trolling or spam. In fact, they appear to be comments from someone who is a regular DCN reader and all-around supporter. Here’s an example and maybe whoever made these comments will recognize them as their own:
That particular article is almost a year old from December 17, 2019 and yet the comments are listed as being posted on Saturday December 12, 2020.
A lot of the comments however are simply blank responses to other people’s comments.
The problem is, if I hit to approve the comments, they show up again within hours in the moderation folder so they have to be sent to the trash. Actually, the biggest problem is, I can only trash 10 or so comments at a time and it can take a half-hour to get rid of them. Every month.
I could just ignore the comments, but then many of our regular readers would have their legitimate comments lost in the moderation folder forever. I actually don’t understand why anything but “Russian sex slaves” and “Google job scams” spam ends up in the moderation folder to being with. Def-Con News has absolutely no restrictions on comments and yet many of our regulars’ comments end up there and have to be approved.
One time the moderation folder started filling up with comments from older articles by our own William Munny. We figured out that he was deleting some of his older comments and that’s why they were getting sent to moderation. Perhaps “Anonymous” is deleting old comments as well, I don’t know.
I did bring up these Anonymous comments ending up in the moderation folder to Munny a while ago and he said he thought it might be a parallel account of one of our regular readers.
Like I said, I’m not mad at this person, I just want to know why so many comments end up in moderation folder every month. Hopefully we can figure out what’s going on and put an end to it.
Also, it has occurred to me that I have no idea how Disqus works and maybe this is just a normal thing. If that’s the case, please don’t make fun of me. Okay, you can give me shit, but keep it semi-civil. No N-words.
In the meantime, thanks for reading and keep testing the limits of the Disqus commenting system.
-Brian
