The Washington Post has a system of badges for commenters.

You can nominate yourself or someone else for high-quality comments in the following categories, and if WaPo agrees, your comments will appear with one of these icons next to your name:

A badge for comments on politics and national affairs.
A badge for comments on Washington area news and trends.
A badge for comments on Washington area sports events and news.
A badge for comments on international affairs.
A badge for those trained by the National Weather Service as Skywarn Spotters.

If I could do a system of badges for the blog commenting here at Althouse, I might like having 5 different badges, but I'd have different categories! Help me fantasize about what the badges could be. And feel free to provide graphic design for the badges.

"1,583 COMMENTS."

Hey! Thanks for all the comments on last night's election live-blog, from which I absented myself after a post at 8:04, noting the obviousness of Romney's impending loss of Wisconsin. I'd started the live-blog (at 5:12) saying "I'm thinking it will all be about Wisconsin" and "I'm Wisconsincentric." I really was.

I came back at 10:04 to say I was "distancing myself from the political fray, reconnecting to my old aversion to politics." And that's quite true. That's my instinct. When it's over, it's over, and it's been such a long campaign season. Time to stop obsessively looking at all the little numbers, take note of the one big number — 303 (or is it 332?) — and widen one's horizons.

What was I doing during those 2 hours? I had the TV on, and I was sitting back playing solitaire on my iPad (which is something I do when I want to listen without getting distracted into my own thoughts). I was calmly waiting for the inevitable to crystalize. I was adjusting to the new political reality in America.

I knew readers were having it out in the comments. Some were taunting and gloating. Some were telling us what they were drinking. There was an occasional "Where's Ann?"

I'm going to be very curious to hear what Althouse has to say tomorrow about her two-hour AWOL right in the heart of election night. Very odd, to say the least.

She always does this when she "live blogs", starts strong and craps out somewhere in the middle.

That last one was Palladian, who himself was away from the comments for a good long while (and who was drinking Ardbeg Uigeadail).

The challenge of running a blog comments section.

Instapundit writes:

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD GETS RID OF COMMENTS ON HIS BLOG: “To make the comments section work in its present form we would have to edit and curate much more aggressively than we do now and in our current judgment the effort needed to do that is better spent improving other features of the blog.”

I toy with the idea of opening comments now and then, but the above has always been my feeling, too.

Mead announces the end of comments effective immediately. No comments on the end of comments. I think he should have had one more comments thread on that post. The previous post, the last post with comments, is saying that the blog hit a new traffic record. That got 11 comments. 11 comments! Is it really that hard to "edit and curate"?

I like Instapundit as it is, without comments, mostly because it's all about sending people to other blogs, so all the other blogs stand in for comments. But if you're not a blog that's about linking to a lot of other people, it feels like there ought to be comments. Maybe it's just because that's what I'm used to.  I don't know. I love the comments section around here.

Word verification for commenting.

I know people have been having more trouble with it lately. I'm going to take it off as an experiment. I've had it on so long, I've forgotten what it was like without it, and who knows if whatever it was will be the situation now? So please don't over-rejoice at its removal, because I might have to turn it back on. I presume I'll get a spate of horrible spam, including endless commercial links dumped in the early morning hours in thousands of old (and new) threads. You think the word verification is difficult, but I can't spend hours a day finding and deleting spam.

If (when) I put the word verification back on, here's a tip: Click the ⟳ until you get one that you find relatively easy to see. Don't waste your time attempting a difficult one.

UPDATE, next morning: It was a pretty good, low-spam over-night here on the blog. I think only 5 or 6 spam comments came in (only one of which was caught by the spam filter, but I found them because I get all comments emailed to me).

"As his guy Scott Walker might say, while the rest of us were in church on Sunday, that's what Meade was up to."

The forum administrator over at Isthmus — "jjoyce" — starts a thread called "Meade being Meade," which (so far) mostly appears to be an attempt to defend the Isthmus's last-blogger-standing, Citizen Dave (who was once Madison's Mayor Dave (Cieslewicz)), who strains to crank out enough prose to suffice as the only blogger left . (They kicked out the brilliant but conservative David Blaska after a couple liberal bloggers left.)

Meade tends to comment — often as the only commenter — on Mayor Citizen Dave's blog — e.g., here — and Dave never responds. I guess he needs to crank out the next blog post so that whole blogging thing can appear to continue to be something that keeps happening at Isthmus, but as a result, you've got these belabored columns blog posts about some damned thing like Mayor Citizen Dave losing his luggage and then there'll be one comment, and it's Meade. Like Meade is the last word on everything Dave ever says.

Why doesn't anyone over there — e.g. Dave or Dave's presumably at least slightly numerous readers — pick up the thread? Why does the conversation go nowhere? Even jjoyce won't go there. He's got to start a separate thread in the forum to discuss the Problem of Meade. It's like Dave's is the lunch table no one will sit at.

Spam.

I'd been ignoring the spam filter in the last week. Thanks to the reader who emailed about missing posts because there were lots of things that got snagged that needed to be released, which I just did.

So... if you've been thinking we were deleting your comments for some mysterious reason, you were probably in amongst the many things caught in the filter.

Crackdown on blog commenting.

In China:

The moves are among the most dramatic censorship efforts undertaken by Beijing since the rise over the past two years of the popular microblogging services, known in China as weibo. They allow the fast dissemination of information, challenging the central government's traditional control of the media....

With the commenting services suspended, users may interact only by republishing others' posts and adding their own words. "Can I say a curse word? No? Then I've got nothing to say," quipped one user on Sina Weibo using the name Wiyu Chuzhi, apparently referencing a popular Chinese Internet joke about unhappiness over rising gasoline prices.

I wonder what all the catchphrases and running jokes and allusions are in China.

Can I say a curse word? No? Then I've got nothing to say.

Why I don't delete mobys in the comments section to this blog.

First, I love free expression, and one way to express a viewpoint is to say the opposite. It's sarcasm. It can be comedy. Look at Stephen Colbert. It's a good — even light-hearted — way to expose the bad side of your opponent's arguments.

Second, we all need to become as competent as possible as consumers of communication. Don't be naive. You need to detect these literary devices. Understand that writers/speakers have ulterior motives. I'm not going to clear out material that requires you to exercise your mental muscles. If you can't tell a moby when you see one, I'm not going to delete him: You need practice. If I see you responding to him as if he were sincere, it makes me sad. Where's your mental toughness? How will you be a competent citizen in the political arena where everyone's always more or less bullshitting?

What is a moby? It's surprisingly hard to Google for your answer. Perhaps the singer Moby — after whom the particular sort of trolling is named — has had more success petitioning Google for reputation help than has Rick "frothy mix" Santorum. So here's Urban Dictionary's most popular definition of Moby:

An insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.

The term is derived from the name of the liberal musician Moby, who famously suggested in February of 2004 that left-wing activists engage in this type of subterfuge: “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion. Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”

The strategy has been frequently attempted on conservative blogs, but has not been nearly as effective as Moby envisioned, since false rumors are easily debunked by fact-checking minions, and cartoonishly extreme commenters often get immediately identified as mobys and banned.

But you don't get banned on my blog for doing that, even though my comments policy, as stated above the compose window, says "we delete... bad faith comments," defining bad faith as "comments that we believe have the ulterior motive of destroying the conversation and driving people away from this forum." A moby can cross the line into bad faith, but mobyism per se is not what I'm talking about. What I want is for readers and commenters not to get suckered by comments that come in this insincere form. I want you to raise your game!

On to the specific incident. This morning, I posted for the first time about the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The point of my post was, as I put it in the comments, to demand that everyone pay attention to and value the actual facts of the case and not to fall prey to more prejudice and stereotypes as they snap up a seemingly useful incident for the purpose of saying something they already want to say about — ironically — prejudices and stereotypes.

A commenter called Dane County Taxpayer posted:

Why was this hoodie black boy walking around this neighborhood? He was out looking to provoke a reaction. He definitely deserves a Darwin award for getting himself killed. Let face it, it is reasonable to assume the worst when you see a hoodie black youth in your gated community. This boy should have known that. The gun grabbers are now using this to push their agenda.

Now, that's obviously a moby. Anyone who took DCT seriously and argued with him on the merits was duped. Please don't be duped. Others, like Palladian, called him out:

"Dane County Taxpayer" is what's called a "moby" troll; it posts deliberately inflammatory, racially-charged comments in order to provoke others to make such comments and therefore have "proof" that the commenters here are "racist".

This particular troll has a very long and ugly history here. Ignore it.

And I said:

Yes, if you didn't recognize Dane County Taxpayer as a moby... you need to up your game. Be a savvy commenter. There are mobys afoot.

Meade wanted us to delete DCT's comment, but I argued with him about the proper meaning of our key policy term "bad faith," and I was adamant that what we will delete is only the commenter who we believe hates this blog and is out to wreck it by undermining the conversation and driving people away. I'm not about saving readers from having to be smart about detecting insincerity and sarcasm. Admittedly, I don't know when someone has crossed my "bad faith" line, but that is the line.

I realize that by drawing the line there, it is possible that someone on some other blog might quote that comment and say Aha! Proof that those terrible right-wing commenters at Althouse are a bunch of disgusting racists! And if I believe the commenter is trying to make that happen, with the purpose of wrecking my blog, I will see him as crossing the bad faith line. And, actually, now that I think about it, I'm inclined to view Dane County Taxpayer as having crossed the line. I think anti-Althousians of the web will see his comment as a delicious tidbit. DCT himself could even start another blog, under a different name and use his own quote to attack me and my commenters.

Having written all this, and given all the pointing out of the mobying that appears in the context of the original comments thread, I'm going to leave the comment up, as a lesson in free speech and reading comprehension.

Breitbart — working on designing HuffPo in '05 — "wanted every commenter to have to pay $1 to comment..."

"... and the dollar would go to charity but the user’s true identity would be authenticated through a credit card."

Also: "He was terrified of the idea that Huffington Post was a competitor to Drudge. He thought that Huffington Post could be bipartisan and that Drudge would love the idea of these big boldface names blogging because he understands the value of that...."

Is it possible to do good "back-end moderation" of comments on a high-traffic blog?

At Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr goes on at some length on the subject but ends up saying, in a word: no.

My blog gets about the same amount of traffic as his. (A little more, actually, lately.) And with Meade's help, my blog now goes with "back-end moderation," as discussed here. It was hard to get around the realization that this is the best approach and that it can actually be done. It does involve paying a lot of attention, applying judgment, and remembering who's said what and what you've done about it in the past. This is a behind-the-scenes role, and maybe it's too Meade-specific for other bloggers to use. But it's working for me.

"In the comments..."

I like to "front page" comments that especially interest me, and I do this on the original post. Sometimes when they really interest me, I feel like writing a new post to let people know that I did an "IN THE COMMENTS" update. This time, that's just what I'm doing.

You may have noticed the new comments policy around here.

My new message above the comments composition window is:

I value all comments made in good faith. Try to understand this concept. It's not about your point of view or your mode of expression. We love disputes and diversity. But I won't allow bad faith commenters to leverage their destructiveness on my commitment to free speech.

Following this new policy and with Meade helping me, we've been deleting commenters we believe are writing in the comments with the purpose of wrecking the forum and driving away the people who enjoy the comments section as a place of free expression.

It's hard to draw this line, and it's possible that we're seeing some commenters the wrong way. The message at the comments window also says "If your comments are deleted and you don't understand why, write to Meade, who is helping me with this," but Meade tells me no one has yet emailed him, so I tend to think we've identified the "bad faithers." Meade says "There are about a dozen. Call them 'The Dirty Dozen.'"

Now, we can also err the other way. There might be a commenter who impresses us with a clever form of expression, even as he hurls insults. My orientation toward free speech has made me very tolerant of people like that, even when they attack me and the commenters here. I've gone very far defending edgy and harsh expression. That's part of why my new policy is about the good faith/bad faith distinction. That distinction depends on the writer's purpose, and purpose can be hard to discern, especially in clever writers.

In this context, there was a commenter who offended a lot of people, but he crafted his comments quite creatively. We delete him now as one of the bad faithers, but there are some ex-commenters who — elsewhere on the internet — excoriate me for leaving his comments up as long as I did. I'm not going to link to these folks whose idea of a good time is attacking me. I'm just going to invite them — and anybody else who's been following this dispute — to click "more" and see a comment that should take them aback.

This is a comment from Trooper York, written at 4:32 p.m. on September 5, 2011 (spelling and punctuations left as is):

Actually J is an acquried taste with a strong opinion and a unique way of presenting it. He has a point of view and is trying to find a way to express in his jazzy improv style. I know that the personal attacks can be annoying but who am I to critize that since I love personal attacks my ownself.

I like to hear someone who thinks so much differently than me. You need both sugar and mustard. You shouldn't get caught up in his name calling. It's just a motif like garage's idoicy and Cedarffords anti-semitism.

He brings a lot to the blog in my humble opinion. Another voice that we should here. Just sayn'

If you haven't been following this dispute but clicked "more" anyway, Trooper runs a blog devoted largely to insulting me, and his primary complaint seems to be my failure to delete J in the past. I normally ignore him, but I found his hypocrisy so amusing and interesting that I had to memorialize it. The trouble with a policy of silence is that you shoot it all to hell if you speak even once, but... whatever... I'll return to my policy of silence. If followers of this now-old dispute need something to chew on, chew on the question whether J was Trooper's sockpuppet, and Trooper was flattering himself.

What's so terrible about internet comments?

Rebecca Rosen complains about the structure of the commenting systems, which, she says, tend to make even well-written comments feel "more like lists of unconnected ideas than genuine conversations." In other words, chronological order is such an old, boring, and obvious order. But it's clear and comprehensible. Do you prefer comments "nested" under the comments they're supposedly responding to or comments that are re-ordered based on commenters voting on comments?

Does chronological order bother you — in comments sections and elsewhere? You know, you have to live your life in chronological order. And that's what's so cool about blogging. Like life, it's in chronological order. I used to resist chronological order. I have an old fantasy of living life out of order, having the power to reshuffle one's allotted days. But you can't do it. And if you abandon chronological order for you blog, it's not a blog anymore.

Respect chronological order. It's the order to beat. You think you have a better order? Prove it.

IN THE COMMENTS:Peter Hoh said:

There ought to be a way to highlight or star a comment like Freeman's "weird out, future man" comment.

That way, someone who is part of this community, but having a busy day, could still read a comment like that without having to plow through the whole thread.

Of course, one could do like I do when there's a long thread -- use the "find" function in my browser to see if Freeman stopped by to leave a comment.

My way to highlight or star a comment is front-paging! Now, you might think I should front-page Freeman's comment, which — I agree with you — was great, but under the circumstances — "standing between two mirrors" — it makes more meta-sense to front-page you.

How to comment at Instapundit.

Vote in (or view) one of his polls. You can comment at the poll results page.

That link goes to today's GOP 2012 nominee poll. Yesterday, he had this poll, with fewer options. And tons of comments at the results page. 136 pages of comments! I was going to copy and paste Meade's comment... but it's too hard to find. He tells me he wrote "Jeb Bush/Rob Portman" with a link to this article by Juan Williams ("The Perfect GOP Ticket In 2012 Would Have Jeb Bush and Rob Portman's Names On It"):

Bush and Portman can’t be marginalized as Tea Party extremists but they can spout enough hot rhetoric to stir the base. They are also perfectly acceptable to the social, economic and foreign policy conservatives in the Republican camp. The Bush-Portman ticket would satisfy the William F. Buckley rule for Republican Primary voters — pick the most conservative candidate who can win.

Tweaking the template.

You may have noticed a few tweaks around here. There's the "Who is Althouse? ✼ How can I contribute?" in the banner. The picture of me in the sidebar is now the width of the Blogads (and no longer accompanied by my name and some added text). The post titles aren't orange-ish anymore. And the format for posting a comment is different.

The comments system is the same, but I've seen a little confusion about it. You have to "select a profile," using the drop-down menu showing 6 ID formats. You only need to do that the first time, and if you were commenting before, you've done it before. You just don't remember.

Also, there are 2 buttons: "Post Comment" and "Preview." If you feel like you're encountering a 2-step process, it's because you hit the "Preview" button. Just read the buttons, and pick "Post Comment" if you don't like previewing.

Please move beyond this initial confusion and take note of how much cleaner and prettier the comments page looks than they old orange-and-tan thing it has replaced.

Finally, you may wonder why I'm fussing with the Blogger aesthetics when I've been saying I'm moving out of Blogger onto an independent site. It's because I'm seriously considering staying with Blogger. I won't trouble you with the problems of moving a blog this big to a new site, but they are huge. I have — with the help of some good people at Google — gotten a full export of my archive (comments and all). But there are many more problems with the transition, and having experienced some nice treatment from Google, I'm quite likely to stay here now.

ADDED: I've gone back to the old comments format. The new one, while prettier, was preventing some people from posting.

When this blog goes independent, you'll have to register to comment.

It will be like the commenting process over at Volokh. How do you feel about that?

Will you comment at the newly independent Althouse blog?
	Yes. I'm a commenter now, and I will continue.
	Yes. I've avoided commenting in Blogger, but I will comment at the new site.
	No. I never comment and I'm not going to start.
	No. I'm a commenter now, but I will stop.
	Maybe. I'm a commenter now, but I might stop.
	Maybe. I'm not a commenter now, but I might start.
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"And of course I run a veritable forced labor camp here...

"... where the authors of our million comments are (doubtless to their shock and horror) entirely unpaid, even though they drive up our page views and thus our income stream. And remember: Every comment you write in response to this post is just further oppression of you. Have you no self-respect?"

Says Eugene Volokh at the end of a post pooh-poohing the lawsuit against the Huffington Post, which made lots of money without paying its writers.

At the Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates's debate, incumbent David Prosser goes after JoAnne Kloppenburg for what commenters have written on her Facebook page.

What can we attribute to the person with the power to delete comments?

While there was no explicit mention of a Dane County judge's decision to issue an emergency order to block the state's contentious new collective bargaining law, Prosser acknowledged the attacks against him on Klopperburg's Facebook page were from people hoping to elect someone to decide "cases that come out of the governor's budget bill."...

Prosser said Kloppenburg is responsible for the comments on her Facebook page and should take them down. He said the nature of the comments raises questions about whether she can impartially decide any cases that come before her with the budget bill. He mentioned one that read, "Stop the turd, vote Kloppenburg."

"Now am I the turd or is the governor the turd?" he said to laughs from the audience. "Either I am being sort of dissed or she is committing herself to vote in a particular way on a particular case. That's totally inappropriate."

Kloppenburg said the people who post the comments are responsible for the content and that the postings aren't untrue.

"They understand that it is so important to have an independent and impartial court," she said of the people posting on her Facebook site.

I have a very free comments policy myself, and this blog's comments thread is full of things I don't agree with, so I'm strongly disinclined to attribute comments to someone who maintains a comments section. Now, a political candidate might want to clean up the comments, but if she doesn't, what does it mean? It might mean nothing more than a failure to monitor the page — mere inattention or sloppiness. It might mean a commitment to free speech. But one might infer that a candidate would scrub comments that were damaging to her in the election and, perhaps, keep what was helpful.

The key question is whether Kloppenburg has "committ[ed] herself to vote in a particular way on a particular case." Clearly, many of her supporters are saying that she is much more likely than Prosser to give them the outcomes they want, and some of them have said that where she has the power to delete. But Prosser's campaign manager wrote in an official campaign news release that Prosser would "act as a common sense compliment to both the new administration and legislature." Now, that's not exactly a "commit[ment]... to vote in a particular way on a particular case," but it's a signal to people on the conservative side that Prosser to is more likely to give them the outcomes they want. Prosser has "disavowed the release and said he didn't see it before it went out," but what's worse? The Prosser campaign statement or the Kloppenburg Facebook comments?

The answer to that question isn't going to determine who votes for which candidate. Obviously. It's a shame if the judicial campaign has turned into a referendum on the Governor and the GOP legislature, but both candidates bear some responsibility for that. Normally, judicial candidates in this state try quite hard to look as though the race is all about judicial skill and temperament. I think Wisconsinites want that message, and, also, that they are more likely to conflate conservative politics with properly judicial skill and temperament. (That's how Gableman defeated Butler, in my view.)

But at this point in the Wisconsin craziness, some unknown large number of Wisconsinites — especially those who will take the trouble to vote on April 5th — see the election as a way to express an opinion about what the Republicans have been doing in Wisconsin. Presumably, there are some more who have opinions about the extent to which a court should check the legislative process — a more conventional view about judging. I think there are also plenty of Wisconsinites who have a general preference for conservative judges. (They worry that liberal judges will be too sympathetic to criminals and that sort of thing.) Lots of people just vote for the incumbent because they figure he's a solid guy who knows what he's doing.

Who will turn out on April 5th? My sense is that the people who have been protesting for the last month have a lot of pent-up energy to expend on getting their people to the polls, and they are saying vote Kloppenburg.

Candyass blogger move of all time: Lawyers, Guns & Money bans Meade!

The little professor Robert Farley couldn't face the challenge Meade made to his (truly lame) post "On Libya" (which I blogged about yesterday).

Imagine not wanting the brilliant, good-humored Meade as a commenter! Here's Farley's last ouch:

Bye, Meade. When the idiocy gets so thick I feel almost compelled to respond, it’s time for you to leave.

Ha. Meade wrote something that demanded a response, and Farley wasn't up to it. The professor had one last oomph of potency: He could oust Meade and delete all his old comments. Incredibly lame. Embarrassing. But apparently not as embarrassing as the inability to deal with a challenge to the scribblings you'd like to believe are so smart and so righteous.

UPDATE: Farley wrote a new post to say thanks for the link. I'm not going to link to it though, because I'm not going to link to them again. I hope they note all the traffic they are getting from here, because they're not getting any more. Of course, they will continue with their dumb attacks on me. But they've cut off the man who defends me from them, so I've got to cut them off too.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian said:

The little professor can delete all he wants, but Google remembers.... Just click the word "cached" under each result to read the Meadey goodness.

There's lots of good stuff in there. You can see what La Petite Farlette and his partner Scott "Kitty" Le Mew were afraid of.

ADDED: I don't link to them anymore, but I'll note that they are getting challenged about deleting all of Meade's old comments. They are trying to argue that all those comments were spam that needed to be removed. But the bloggers and commenters over there had interacted with Meade. You don't interact with spam. A step up from spam is "troll." But everyone knows not to feed the troll. Why did they go back and forth with Meade if he was a troll? Their interaction is the evidence that he was not a troll. Robert Farley simply became exasperated and embarrassed when Meade outwrote him, and he destroyed the material that made him look bad. He's like a scientist who destroys his data after his conclusions are questioned.  The obvious presumption in the case of destruction of evidence is that it hurt your case.  Of course, the evidence of their interaction with Meade is still there, and that evidence also, as I've just explained, is evidence against them. What colossal losers!

Joe Blow wins the thread!

Do you like it when a commenter says that so-and-so "wins the thread"?
	Yes, it's snappy and adorable. If you disagree, disagree!
	No. It's irritating to appoint oneself as the arbiter of the quality of comments!
	No. It annoys me to have the thread characterized as a competition.
	Yes. Other commenters will up their game if they get the feeling it's a competition.
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