Bowerbird wrote:

the last 3-4 comments i sent to teleread were "flagged" for "review by an administrator" as "spam" and have never appeared.  they weren't controversial comments, just me finishing a few threads in case i was banned. so it appears to me my hall pass has been revoked...

Since David Rothman is up to his eyeballs with something at the moment, he asked me to check into this. It's the first time I've deeply dug under-the-hood of the TeleRead blog application. What a complicated mess! (Not David's fault, just the way WordPress and all the plugins make it.) First of all, you might have privately contacted David first before bothering with the gutvol-d people here in case there was a technical issue, which this appears to be so far. So I'm posting this reply here since you've made a lot of serious accusations. I'd rather not have to, and I'm sure most gutvol'ers would rather we not post this stuff here, either. Second, David said that he has not placed you into a spam filter, and that you still have full comment posting privileges. So he's perplexed as to what the problem is. Now, David did mention that 4-5 hours ago he noticed, out of the several hundred spam messages he gets every day which his two automated spam filters catch (Spam Karma 2 and Akismet Spam), one of your messages. He flagged it as no-spam to be posted, but my check through the comment database for the last several hours did not find it -- so it never did get posted. This may be due to a problem, either with the software, or David didn't do it right (David is not a computer geek, and the software/plugins were clearly designed by geeks for geeks.) 1and1 itself, which hosts the TeleRead blog, has been going berserk the last few days with various types of problems. 1and1 is also slow as molasses because of some ftp server issue that's slowing down PHP to a crawl... Anyway, something strange did go on. The next thing I did was a test, where I posted a test comment using Bowerbird's id (user: bowerbird, email: bowerbird@aol.com). The comment was successfully posted. I then deleted it. This is not a definitive test, since a spam filter can also filter by IP address. Bowerbird, what I urge you to do is to resend one or more of your comments, and let's see what happens. I purged the spam filter results (after looking for your other comments which I did not find), so if your message(s) again get placed into the spam bucket, they will be much easier to see -- it's tough when there are several hundred there. Note that in the last few months, the spam filter logs show they caught 54,141 spam messages, while there were 2074 legitimate comments !!! That means for every legitimate comment, there are over 25 spam messages. David has limited time to scan the entire spam messages (on occasion he finds a legitimate comment), so it is entirely possible he missed your other 2-3 messages from today. But the problem of why they got put in the spam bucket in the first place, and why one was not "despammed" when found, remains to be determined. And why my test comment was successful while yours earlier were not (assuming you posted them correctly), is also perplexing. So, if you're still interested, post a comment or even a test comment. Also note that Bowerbird is the 3rd most prolific commenter on David's TeleRead blog.

but meanwhile, rothman is posting comments saying i am "welcome" there (albeit with huge reservations), and that no one is being censored or even moderated.

I've known David for a few years now, and believe what he says. But his patience is definitely wearing thin, and your message here to gutvol-d before checking with him privately has only wore away more of his patience. He will ban you from the TeleRead blog if you continue to foster a hostile community environment by *how* you post, not *what* you post, to the TeleRead blog.

so don't believe everything you read on the internets!

Definitely, never believe anything posted anywhere, including to gutvol-d!

i don't know how to resolve the discrepancy here... perhaps he's willing to tell a great big lie in order to save a little bit of face.  or maybe it's "a coincidence" that all of a sudden my comments stopped appearing.

Or it's not a lie and there was some technical glitch. Let's resolve it. Or do you want to be a martyr?

whatever the case may be, it's clear that rothman wants only "yes-men" on his blog, and i am not one of those, so i see no need for me to be there, thank you very much.

For those who are allowed to post articles (not the same as comments), David appears to pick those who are on a similar wavelength and are good writers (he's always been on my case for not writing for the "common folk"). Luminaries such as Branko, Roger Sperberg, Sadi, and several others. That's his prerogative. Cory Doctorow doesn't let just anyone post articles to BoingBoing, but he has his trusted favorites. But when it comes to comments, the only censoring David is doing now is removing clearly spam comments.

and i actually succeeded for two months, then relapsed when he was in the midst of a campaign to give readers the impression that openreader was _the_ way to get a publicly-shared annotation capability.  (it might be _one_ way, but it's certainly not the only way, not by a long shot.)

Actually, I agree with you here. OpenReader/OEBPS definitely enables annotative capability, but other formats may also allow that function. The key is that the format, whatever it is, does not get in the way or make it much more difficult.

so any uncertainty about whether i've been banned or not doesn't really matter, because i'd just as soon not be there. i am certainly not going to "submit" comments that might never appear, and might have been "edited" when they do. so the banning is helping me to keep my resolution!        :+)

You've not been banned *yet* from the TeleRead blog, but your out-of-control reply here definitely puts you one step closer to the brink. David does welcome your participation, so long as your messages don't foster a hostile environment. But his patience is wearing thin, just as my patience wore thin when you were on ebook-list (what TeBC was once called) and I had dozens of people asking me to kick you off -- I kept you on for over a year after there was a majority consensus that you should be unsubscribed. I changed the rules of baseball and gave you four strikes, but you still struck out.

oh, that doesn't mean i'm going to stop puncturing the hype put out by the rothman/noring spin machine.  it just means that i will not be doing it where they control my microphone.

You know, your message is itself full of hype and spin. Sometimes when one points a finger, there are four others pointing back.

it's so silly to think that they can silence me by banning me! cyberspace has no shortage of soapboxes, and branko won't be able to edit me or delete me when i use my own soapbox. but i'll be sure to let the world know he _would_, if he _could_, as demonstrated by the fact that he already _did_...

If you are to be banned, it's because some of your messages tend to create a very negative, hostile environment. Such action (banning) is to protect the integrity of the entire community, not to silence your "message." As I continue to stress, it's not *what* you post, but *how* you post it. David and I would normally be alright with your constant hostile harping towards us personally (it comes with the territory), but such non-rational, hateful harping has a negative impact on the entire community who participate in the blog. As noted before, it creates a hostile environment that inhibits some from participation since how do they know they won't be the next target for no good reason? In essence, your claim that we want to silence your ideas from the whole world is itself spin (hype). It's not what you say, but *how* you say it that we are flagging, and I think many here on gutvol-d would agree. I'm still wondering why you don't cultivate your own blog, where you set the rules and can say pretty much what you want within legal limits. Before long, your blog will undoubtedly get more traffic than the TeleRead blog!

oh, for the record, branko's "editing" consisted of three things.

Thanks for clarifying this.

first, he removed my linebreaks;  might or might not seem significant to you, but that's irrelevant, it's significant to me; you don't mess with a poet's linebreaks.

second, he removed my z.m.l.-style _styling_ markers and replaced them with actual styling.  (bold in the one instance.)

finally, he uppercased some of my letters.  that's a huge no-no.

i write my posts the way i do as an expression of my individuality. if anyone thinks i will tolerate their "editing" out that individuality, they're wrong.  but even more to the point, _no_one_ should have their comments on a blog be "edited" by the blog's owners.  ever.

As I noted at TeleRead, Branko had the editorial right to do this, especially if it shortened the message and added typographic clarity. Now should he have done this? I don't know, probably not. But it was *his* article, and I have no difficulty with him editing comments in a "typographic" sense in order to increase legibility/readability and meet other goals he had. Now if he trimmed out actual content, actual points you made, then that's another matter. You may claim that how you format your replies *is* in and of itself important content -- but I would not be surprised if 99.9% of all people would disagree with you -- I definitely do not agree with you. It's the words, not how they are splashed on the page, which is important -- sort of reminds me of Project Gutenberg in some way.

anyway, it will be nice to go back to keeping my 2006 resolution!

Yes it would! <laugh/>

moreover, it will be fun to pull back my "reality check" and watch, as the rothman/noring machine might spin itself out of control...

Well, there's never a guarantee of success of any endeavor. We may fail, but then, so what? Better to have tried and failed, than not tried at all. I'm not afraid of failure. After one fails in some other endeavor and then finds it doesn't destroy one's life -- that one can pick themselves up and start over -- makes it easier to try other things and to be less fearful of failure. Throw enough mud on the wall and something will stick. <laugh/>

i don't know about you, but paranoia _this_ grandiose is tremendously amusing to me!  heck, it makes me wish i would have been _egging_him_on_ all along, instead of providing a calm and rational counterbalance to his hype. i bet it'd be easy to find "evidence" that supports his fears, because he seems willing to believe some crazy things...

it's too late for _me_ to do that now, but if _someone_else_ were to feed his hysteria, it might create some fun reading!

ah, the world of e-books.  what an interesting "community".      :+)

anyway, i am sorry to disturb all you fine people digitizing books. you can return to your important work now.  thanks for your time.

Do you realize that what you just wrote above is the exact reason you've been kicked off of so many mailing lists? It is borderline hate speech. You are weaving together emotionally-laden words, thereby creating spin of the worst type. Reminds me of the worst of "National Enquirer". For one who points his finger all the time at others and yells: "Hype!", "Spin!", you certainly don't realize how much you use spinmeister techniques in your messages. Jon Noring