Sibylla Bostoniensis

cellio

dw_maintenance

All we can do is wait until the block expires, and they will neither tell us how long any given block will be active for nor a date/time when it will expire -- as I said, at this point they no longer respond to me when I email them about the issue, and haven't for quite some time.

Two administrative notes:

First, for you folks who comment anonymously,

If you haven't signed up for (or tried out) a Dreamwidth account, just so you know, there is one aspect of the conversation here that you likely are unaware of missing.

Dreamwidth has a surprisingly robust system of private commenting.

Comments here have something called a "screening" setting: they are either "unscreened", so anyone can see them, or "screened" meaning only I and the person who made them can see them. I whitelist some commentors so their comments are automatically posted "unscreened" (and I post-moderate them); everybody else, their comments post as "screened" and I pre-moderate them.

My principles of comment moderation bear no resemblance to the rules of moderation anywhere else. In fact, what I am doing with "moderation" is so radically different from what apparently everyone else means by it, you probably would not think that is what "moderation" means. What you see publicly is, as I recently quipped to a friend, bonsai. I "moderate" – screen comments – extremely heavily, to constrain and shape the conversation here. A lot of comments – even comments you would think are good, thoughtful, engaged comments – never see the light of day. Sometimes because there's something wrong with them. Sometimes because they are wonderful in every way, but I don't want the conversation to go in that direction in that time and place.

But I read them.

And the way DW works, if a comment in my journal is "screened", I can reply to it, with my own replies also "screened". And the person to whom I replied with a screened comment can reply with their own screened comments. And so on back-and-forth. In this way, that commentor and I can have a conversation that only the two of us are party to – a private conversation just between us.

Or rather, we can, iff the other commentor isn't an anon. This feature, for obvious reasons, requires that both parties have DW accounts they're commenting under. When you create a DW account – even just through OpenID – you have to provide DW with an email address. In this way, when someone responds to a comment you made that's screened, you get notified about the comment. Were I to reply to an screened anon comment, there's no one to notify that I replied, and the anon who made the comment has no way to see my reply, which is invisible to the public.

Now, I'm not guaranteeing that if you just had a DW account you posted your comments here under, that I would be having private chats with you. I don't use this option very much, and I generally prefer my responses to be public. But it's not that I never do it. By not using an account, you are foreclosing on the possibility that I would ever address you privately – and since the statistical odds are much higher here than elsewhere that the moderator (me) won't make your comment public, that might have been all the response you were going to get.

Please do not take any of this as shaming or hassling you (or anyone) for commenting anoymously. Many people have good reasons for doing that; sometimes people, maybe you, have DW accounts and choose not to use them specifically to make anon comments. More power to you! I have a very slight preference that people pick some nym to comment under just to help me track the conversation, but I strongly support anonymity as a valid choice and I also respect it if people chose not to trust DW or email vendors or whomever. (And in case it needs be said, in no way, shape, or form do I want to know your "real" name, and indeed, I, personally, think this journal's comments section is the perfect example of a place everyone would be wise to use a pseudonym.)

I just wanted to make sure you knew about this thing going on that's invisible if you're not logged in, so you can figure it in to your decision-making process.

For people using the screening feature to post private comments,

A few of you have been exercising the screened comment feature, by leaving me coments with, say, juicy industry gossip or wrenching private personal disclosures, and indicating to me in the body of the comment, "Please don't unscreen this comment."

These are often very high-value comments and I'm thrilled to get them and humbled and honored by the trust you repose in me to keep your confidentiality.

They also make me real nervous, because while DW's screening feature is surprisingly robust, it's still missing some features I consider crucial. Chief among them, I have no way to make a comment's screening status "permanent", and there's no comment moderation workflow system whereby I can mark a comment "reviewed" so I don't go back and change the status of a comment after realizing I shouldn't have it public.

This means I'm one sleepy misclick away from accidentally making your confidential comment public.

I would much prefer, if you would like to tell me something in confidence, you did it through the Inbox (DW's DM system). That way, there's no way I can accidentally expose your comment to the entire internet just because I was trying to click on the "reply" link and missed.

Sincerely,

Siderea

if (pop @folders) {
	$mhspam = join("/", $maildir, @folders, ".mh_spam");
    }else {
	$mhspam="";  # don't bother.
	last;
    }