This message will be held for moderation

We are all used to going to make a post on Comment is Free (except for people like me, perhaps, who have given up on the dump except for experimental purposes) only to find that our account has been deleted for reasons of censorship and ideological control.

We are all used to going back to a thread to see how a discussion is going, only to find that our post has been deleted, again for reasons of blatant censorship and ideological control.

What sometimes causes confusion, though, is the "This message will be held for moderation" warning which appears on your little screen before you even try to do anything.

This one means that the little pound-shop terrorists who police CiF are onto you, so you had better watch your Ps and Qs or they will blind you with their dayglo yellow tabards and pretend they have powers of arrest.

What could cause such a need to silence someone before they have even spoken?

Apparently this:

Comment 1

New Labour (are they going to keep that brand, by the way?) is now the third party, occupying the place formerly used by the LibDems.

This means that nobody is interested in them, let alone their petty internal wrangles.

Both David Yelland and Andrew Rawnsley on these pages have said that the position of the third party is to be totally ignored and to have to beg for any small and slight attentions from the media.

New Labour was dead long before it was buried at the election.

Off with the old Thatcherite neo-cons and on with the new Thatcherite neo-con-libs.

The idea that changing a government changes anything which actually matters to ordinary people - ordinary hardworking families - in the real world is a mixture of quaint and tiresome.

Who are the main contenders for Dear Leader again?

The Minibars and Condoleezza Rice?

Comment 2

It is as though the discrediting of British politics had never happened. Happily, on this issue, the people are on the other side of the argument from the politicians. The electorate's interest lies in greater fairness and more equal votes. We do not have such a system now. So things must change

.

We are almost at the stage where the MPs' expenses scandal has become a myth. People remember bits about it and imagine that some of it was true, but it's all a bit too hazy to bother about, especially when you know that you are soon going to have to start boiling up grass collected from the roadside if you want to feed your children.

Which, of course, is exactly what the political classes knew would happen. They could afford to bide their time and knew that things would simply revert to normal if they kept schtum. Of course, they are know bullying the new body which is supposed to oversee their pilfering and profligacy, so in a few years it will be worse than before.

"So things must change."

Is that because The Guardian says so? Because the feeling is that the general mood of the public demands it? Neither of those things has brought about change before, so why should they now?

Andy Burnham has turned against reform. Jack Straw is manufacturing excuses for Labour to wriggle off its commitment. Meanwhile Labour bitterness towards the Liberal Democrats is feeding a mood of arid destructiveness towards even the good things that could come out of the coalition. If Labour is to deserve support as a party of progressive reform, it needs to listen to the leadership candidates who have been calmest and truest to the AV cause.

New Labour really hardly matters any more. They are the padding, the ballast and the make-weights now and during their thirteen year regime, they never showed themselves to be progressive reformers, so nobody is looking at them for that now.

In fact, nobody is looking at New Labour at all any more. Like the prime minister who, on leaving office, suddenly loses his or her gleaming, chauffeur-driven limousine and has to make do with a dented old Austin Allegro, New Labour has gone from the offices of state to a converted garden-shed with a leaning portaloo propped perilously to one side.

Mr Clegg originally wanted the referendum early in the parliament to capitalise on the electorate's general goodwill towards the coalition. That goodwill, and thus that reasoning, still holds good.

Perhaps, but if a week is a long time in politics, a year is at least a lifetime.

By next May, people will be waking up to the idea that we are not really "all in this together."

They will have slowly come to understand that they are being fleeced in order to make Britain a low-wage economy, able to compete for the favours of big business on the global slave-market.

They will have noticed that changing a government does not actually change anything at all, since governments simply act as the servants to global business interests.

People might even remember that it was the banks which caused the global economic meltdown and wonder why it is that they and their neighhbours and other hardworking families are being punished for it.

The penny might just finally drop.

At that point, the smiles and grins of Dave and Nick might be wearing thin and the artificial love-in we have been pretending to enjoy with our sleek, smart-suited and spun new Dear Leaders will be getting tired.

We may just think that having three Tony Blairs in one lifetime is simply too much of a good thing for anyone.

Comment 3

CiFAndrew

It might work, but you may also find that the best commentators below the line are usually pretty much personae non gratae unless they doggedly applaud and parrot the party line as declared and clumsily etched in stone by the cheerleaders and circus-barkers who occupy the positions of power at Propaganda HQ.

Anyway, The Guardian seems to be hoping that teh internetz will save its bacon by using its new APIs, which will allow other websites to publish Guardian content, as long as they also carry advertising to create a resounding kerching for the Guardian's tills.

Real world newspaper circulation will continue to decline as long as newspapers are seen to be simply the megaphones of the rich, the establishment, the state and big business.

CiF has certainly never subscribed to the belief that its readers are intelligent and able to make their own judgements, frequently in opposition to the pronouncements and idiocies of its star journalists.

It works on the basis of suppressing dissent and shouting the same things louder, assuming that this line of attack will win in the end.

Meanwhile, of course, money pours from its coffers like water from Dear Liza's holey bucket, as it hopes to attract those wandering newsless refugees camped in the derelict wasteland just beyond Mordoch's pay-wall.

Suggestions like afancdogge's above to rally the traditional Guardian readership are ignored in case they upset the dilettante droves who are the intended financial milch-cows because they will not be able to resist clicking on any flickering, insistent and colourful adverts.

_________________

Perhaps any reasonable person can see that incendiary comments like that must lead to the person making them having a muzzle strapped over their mouth, even on the pages of a newspaper which pretends to be liberal and wants to go international.

Well, that was my three strikes and you're out episode with The Guardian's Comment is Free, which they apparently try to market without any irony or sniggering in the background.

I think I'll pop back for more of their nonsense in due course.

They are obviously too stupid to learn.

PS When will Matt Seaton answer the moderation question?

Is he too scared or just too thick?

WADDYA Facing Shutdown

Last weekend, the power-house of political and social debate, WADDYA, had to slam its virtual doors in the faces of the chattering classes because someone had said something rude and made the beautiful people cry.

Apparently, if decorum and sticking rigidly to the official Guardian line cannot be maintained, this will have to happen again.

The sensibilities of people like SpecialBrut are so fragile and the debate on WADDYA so essential to the proper functioning of the world that it has to be protected at all costs.

Here is how the janitor of WADDYA describes it:

This thread was a nightmare for our mods recently (although it was very good this week, must say), and it gets an awful lot of comments at times, especially at week-ends. As you know, we rely partly on our community self-moderating (i.e reporting comments which are clearly abusive or trolling) to keep the Guardian's communities as aggreeable and decent as possible.

Does this area get special treatment for some reason?

In that it will close again if unmanagable? Yes, I guess.

Have a nice week-end.

Thank you. Have a humdinger yourself.

Let's all just hope that none of those horrible wreckers turn up this weekend, otherwise we are all done for.

Congratulations, er, Celebrations, um, Jubilation

It is, perhaps, a mark and signal of the gravity of the occasion that we begin today's post by using solemn words from the monumental talent of Sir Clifford Richard.

Congratulations! der der dah dah, erm, der

Celebrations dah dah doo doo

Jubilation der doh happy as can be!

A weight has been lifted from our collective souls and we have seen the one true light, thanks to a vision which was shared with this congregation by the prophet misharialadwani in yesterday's comments section.

We have been wrong to poke fun at Comment is Free and the Matt Seaton Gang.

As Leo Trotsky said: "The reason we are called celebrities is because we are celebrated. Do you know what that means?" (That was Leo Sayer. Trotsky was called Leon. They made a film about him, called Leon with Jean Reno and Natalie Portman. Ed).

Instead of poking the pointy finger of fun at CiF, we are going to screech and lurch around the bend of righteousness and highlight the good things which make CiF such a special place on the internet, populated with people having special needs.

To kick things off, we start with one of the queens of CiF, Brusselsexpest, also known as SpecialBrut:

"We need a thread on cocktails - now that summer (OK warmer rain) is here."

[SpecialBrut is a male homosexual who does not live in Brussels, but a damp bedsit in Pinner, from which he travels to wait on tables in a cafe de transport owned by a fat man in a string vest, where he dreams of one day of being whisked off his feet by a lorry driver and becoming an international spy, saving governments from collapse across the world, with a secret night-time career as an opera singer called Hannah Mentalist].

CiF Hearts Rupert Murdoch

The Guardian always lays great store by the fact that it is financed by a trust with dodgy tax dealings, which it claims means that it does not have to tug its forelock to shareholders or media mogul proprietors.

Which makes it strange that it frequently runs editorials and articles fawningly praising the abundant and unquestionable brilliance of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

It has even, in the past, run articles (you know, the ones which look like propaganda pieces) by James Murdoch and protected him from embarrassment by mowing down dissenting voices from the BTL ranks and then pulling the article altogether when, presumably, little James's face was blushing with such vermilion violence that there was fear he might explode.

So, here is CiF in its best cheerleader mode, with its pants around its ankles, about to fellate the octogenarian Emperor of News:

Set aside the personalities and the politics for a moment, and the idea of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation buying all of BSkyB makes pure commercial sense. After all, Sky does television and News Corp does papers – and the boundaries between the two are getting increasingly blurred in the digital age. Type news.sky.com into your internet browser and you get an impressive news website that would make any newspaper proud. But BSkyB has an even more important attribute that News Corporation lacks: it is a massive and well-run tollbooth on the media highway.

Free virtual sick-bags for every reader.

CiF: Beyond Praise, Complaint or Parody

The Untrusted pointed out a spot of possible deletions on the WADDYA thread, which involved whether The Guardian would publish anything from ordinary people, which led me to trundle over there to see what was going on.

Having said that we should start copying and pasting posts which look like prime deletion candidates, this is what I did.

The sequence was this:

PaulBJ

15 Jun 2010, 12:56PM

Jessica

I think it would be a good idea to have a Peoples Panel on Poverty in Britain. Panelists would be peope who are classified as long term relatively poor by British standards.People who are either stuck in mimimum wage jobs and/or long term recipients of State benefits.

Obviously anonymity would have to be guaranteed as some people may be working in the 'Black Economy' to make ends meet.Whilst others may be claiming benefits as a single person whilst secretly cohabiting with a partner.Additionally the poor are often denied mainstream financial services so are vulnerable to the loan sharks.

There are so many different angles to this that could be explored.However the Right wing media has done a pretty good job in either demonising the poor or reverting to splitting them up into the categories of 'deserving' and 'undeserving.'And clearly there are also a few regular CIF posters who are inclined to blame the poor for their predicament.So if a few people who are chronically as opposed to temporarily classified as relatively poor in Britain are prepared to share their stories it could prove to be enlightening all round

zounds

15 Jun 2010, 3:45PM

An article, in the Guardian of all places, advocating (essentially) the removal of the right to strike. I honestly never thought I'd see the day. My granddad must be turning in his grave. What with the tone of comments these days, when you get articles like that it's hard to see what differentiates this paper from any other neo-liberal rag.

[Article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/15/trade-union-strike-immunity]

Then this from carnivalesque:

PaulBJ

I think it would be a good idea to have a Peoples Panel on Poverty in Britain. Panelists would be peope who are classified as long term relatively poor by British standards.People who are either stuck in mimimum wage jobs and/or long term recipients of State benefits.

This was actually suggested a year or two ago, at about the time that the Global Economic Meltdown had moved from being a twinkle in the bankers' eyes to a mess in their collective underpants.

No, you didn't miss it. CiF did not pursue the idea, perhaps because nobody at The Guardian knew any poor people to ask how it felt to keep being robbed by the rich from generation to generation.

Don't hold you breath.

zounds

An article, in the Guardian of all places, advocating (essentially) the removal of the right to strike. I honestly never thought I'd see the day. My granddad must be turning in his grave. What with the tone of comments these days, when you get articles like that it's hard to see what differentiates this paper from any other neo-liberal rag.

Yes, don't try looking too hard for something which is not there.

How about combining the two, CiF, and just parading a group of stupid poor people on these pages to be laughed and spat at?

The Daily Mail might even stop your losses and buy you out.

_________________

Obviously, the comment by carnivalesque was not allowed to live to tell the tale.

Bring Out Your Dead!

Just a quick thought, which I put on UT earlier.

If you are posting on Comment is Free and finding your work disappears faster than you can keep putting it up, you can dump it here for safekeeping.

I will try to post something to kick the day off every morning or thereabouts, so that there is a thread for people to either copy and paste the efforts of others who are making intelligent contributions to CiF or, of course, their own.

Either way, we all know that Comment is Free moderators are always very ready to censor and ban and far too impressed with their own perfection to offer an explanation to those whose efforts pay their wages, so once your comment disappears from CiF, it is gone for good if you have not taken the trouble to keep your own copy.

Think of it like the virtual bin into which your work is thrown, but one in which you can ferret around and find the pearls you and others have been casting before swine.

The Life and Death of Henry III

The expected lifespan of a mayfly is supposed to be less than a day.

The lifespan of a good poster on Comment is Free seems to be about the same, before the moderators see the potential for unapproved lines of thought and ideological dissent, requiring the need to delete posts in order to deprive that particular producer of free content of the will to bother.

After that, it is just onto the next until everyone who posts comments on CiF only ever thinks of conforming with the approved pattern and there is only choreographed and manipulated artificial dissent to give the impression of actual thought, to harmonise the robotic chorus from the CiFerati who have been stamped with the Matt and Jess seal of approval.

This is HankScorpio yesterday on The Untrusted:

Anyway, fuck it. HenryTheThird just posted a doozie on Barbara Ellen's thread.

This is 13thDukeofWybourne today: 

Oh, and I am enjoying HenrytheThird's posts. He/she is shaping up to be a promising young poster.

This is Alisdair Cameron today:

I agree with those praising HenryTheThird: he (?..you never know) is eviscerating the Observer's big-name,big-salary columnists one by one today in a very clinical fashion.

This is Atomboy, in the same place:

Yes, so no surprises, perhaps, that by the time I get to have a look on the thread to see what is going on, HenryTheThird has been deleted virtually out of existence.

Perhaps we should all just take to copying any posts which seem too good to last and pasting them here or elsewhere, linked to the place from which they were snatched to safety before the moderbators attacked them with virtual scissors and knives.

Let me just run this by everyone again:

We do see a consistency in moderation, don't we, in the sense that good, intelligent posters get deleted wholesale and idiotic spouters of verbal sewage get patted on the back and invited back to virtual dinner-parties by the lackeys and servants at CiF Towers?

Why would anyone want to be a member of that stunted and grotesque artificial social clique?

And back to Alisdair Cameron:

Just checked and you're dead right, Atomboy. HenryTheThird has had 5 deletions this morning, and not one of them to my recollection contravened any purported talk policy, but they all embarrassed the paper and its columnists. Wouldn't expect anything less from the august Guardian Media group.
Ah,well, it's their funeral.No point in getting worked up about their moderation, since their judgement is demonstrably flawed in so many ways.

So, a brief word of warning to any putative HenryTheThirds out there:

If you have something interesting and intelligent to say, don't bother posting it on Comment is Free. They really don't want to know.

If, however, you can chuck out forty one-line posts a day of utter inanity, you will be welcomed with open arms.

UT on WADDYA

Here are some of the thoughts from people on The Untrusted regarding Jessica Reed's little hissy-fit in closing WADDYA for the weekend to prove that the voices of the horrible people can be silenced if you know which button to press - or which member of the IT team to ask.

Bitterweed

Waddya was developed into its current format shortly after UT rocked up - as a holding tank for potentially unruly account holders, a place where moderators could go and gaze at the wild and uneven outside world, but without having to delete comments on mind-numbed reflex, because they also knew everyone would there act out of aspiration rather than egalitarian exchange of ideas; they would therefore moderate themselves and yet make CiF appear cooler

The fucking amateurs.

HankScorpio

I see Cif as a place for bored middle class professionals to get together to pontificate about how the world would be a much better place if only the poor worked a little bit harder, and for less money.

It fucking annoys me beyond endurance that kizbot and bru get indulged on there, the pair of them posting arrant nonsense on there all day, while Athens and Brussels burns in the background, and neither them or fellow posters question whether middle class jobs could be cut.

Let's cull the jobs of middle class wasters like kizbot and brussels if efficiency savings need to be made.

Stick that up as an idea on waddya and see where that gets you.

HankScorpio

@martillo and chekhov - fair play to Jess for taking the ball home with her. The waddya thread is a fucking joke, and has been for a year or more. It's somewhere for kiz and bru and all the hangers on to bitch and gossip and ultimately say nothing much at all. MavisCoulter and MelissaDarley have seen through all the crap there, and their comments got deleted as a result.

It's interesting to note, as HenryTheThird said, that the proliferation of posters with "C"s against their names on Cif over the last year or so have almost exclusively come from the ranks of the luvvies who kiss each others' arses on waddya.

There are a lot of interesting and informed posters on Cif, posting on domestic politics, finance, foreign affairs etc. A vanishingly small number of them get commissioned to write ATL though, because they're not in the waddya gang, and the editorial staff at Cif are too lazy to read those threads or to talent-spot beyond the tea and jaffa cake crowd of time-wasting idiots on waddya.

Very few of those who have got commissioned by Cif to go above the line in the last year have anything of interest to say, and very few of them post regularly elsewhere on Cif because they would be shot down in flames by those far more informed than they are.

La Ritournelle

Just a quick slag off - Kizbot is a bloody pain in the arse, but "Imogen -Pleeeeeze give me job on the Guardian-Black" is worse. Her comments btl on the Unemployment thread are infantile and as for being asked to 'contribute' well, pah, her 'contribution was pretty asinine - I'm sure someone will commission her soon (Jess/Matt) as she's got everything they need - nice white middle class girl, pwetty face (just look at my professional shot avatar) an ex-actress, miles of vacouous vaguely left wing b/s to spout and her contributions below the line read like one long CV.

HankScorpio

They shut waddya just when it was likely to get interesting. Kizbot posted some old shite about waddya just being a cosy little corner, not to be taken seriously, so why did trolls go on there and get so venomous about the regulars on there. The usual self-justifying crap we've come to expect from the self-appointed Queen of Bland, to which HenryTheThird responded (paraphrasing, from memory):

"Nobody would have objected to waddya being a cosy little corner for Cif regulars to while away their working days.

The problem was that waddya became disproportionately important in the eyes of the Cif staffers, who started commissioning the in-crowd to write stuff above the line, even though it should have been clear that the only reason waddya regulars posted their views regularly on waddya was because they would have been exposed as woefully out of their depth elsewhere on Cif."

As I say, I'm paraphrasing. I'd have copied and pasted but the post in question has been deleted.

gandolfo

Hank I pretty much agree with you
I see it as a grooming ground to get BTL that fit into the "profile" of the average Guardian reader...it's kind of Islington wine bar chit chat...full of identity right on politics that spew from the mouths of people that essentially haven't had to fight for anything in their lives and have no real intention of doing it unless they risk their iPhone...what sums it up is that bloody "rush home for the nanny" thread the other day.......
Alas decent posters and ATLers are in a minority...

Alisdair Cameron

Did get talking to someone who knows a lot about the Guardian's working, knows q a few of the staff. In brief,they are bollocksed. Business plan is like the South Park underpant gnomes but my source was very enlightening about the staff. The upper echelons are hated for being overpaid and massively incompetent, and of more interest to UTers there is little love lost between real news journalists and the all-singing,all-dancing multimedia fluff merchants, and some figures disliked on the UT are disliked in their workplace too.

chekhov

Hank: agreed with most of your comment on "wadya". However, as much as I don't have much time for Kizbot et al, she made a valid point in that when the wadya thread was first set up, it was ignored by most people and the ones who did respond ended up inventing a chat room.
That's my recollection of what happened anyway, feel free to tell me I if I am wrong.
Well we all know how it panned out; more and more people joined in and started to challenge the orthodoxy. To cut a long story short the Oxbridge cretins who set up the thread didn't like the fact many btl were more intelligent than themselves, so they called in the "Mods" to hose down the hoi polloi.
It didn't work of course which is why Jesicca has taken her bat and ball home.

Alisdair Cameron

@ the Duke. That's about as much as I got, I'm afraid, but a certain cyclist's departure wasn't viewed as sad by all...
The big bunfight though is between those obsessed with new media gimmickry, video pieces etc (which are too often fronted by good-ish print journos, who aren't broadcasters, and it shows...and most readers don't have the internet speed/bandwidth to watch the bloody pieces) who hog all the resources, and those who think a little more focus on, er, news, in a newspaper, might be a higher priority.
Non-'sexy' items (i.e. those which aren't unsubstantiated, ATL trolling typically on gender/race/faith,those centred on vacuous ephemeral celeb shite, or thos tenuously tying something topical to the author's hobby-horse, streching credulity all the while) are getting marginalised, and the notion of actually investigating anything, or sophisticated,nuanced analysis has been marginalised.
Obviously you can guess with which category of staffer my source consorts and sympathises, and that cohort of journalists are looking to jump ship before they are thrown overboard.

.............

There may be more but, as I have said, CiF has become a dead horse which I am no longer very interested in flogging.

I am working on one or two other things, so if anyone has an interest in CiF which can beat mine, (which cannot be bothered to struggle anywhere much above nil) they are welcome to take over. Otherwise, things will just have to remain very occasional and desultory in terms of posting here - unless something interesting actually happens on CiF, for which I am not holding my breath.

All The Stars Are Out Tonight

This needs to be prefaced with a confession. I started this blog (and you, too, can have one up and running in about five minutes, so it does not require a great deal of thought) under the impression - the misapprehension - that I would somehow forever be bothered about the fate and fortunes of Comment is Free (or CiF to its friends).

The simple truth is that I now could not care less, to the degree that it hardly ever crosses my mind to make the one idle, thoughtless click which would take me back to its pages, teeming with the furious activity of people living life on a tiny scale. 

CiF was buggered and bludgeoned, beaten into senselessness, neutered and strangled by Matt Seaton and his imbecile acolytes, all obsequiously aided and abetted by the clamouring wannabes of WADDYA and those achingly desperate to acquire a blue sticker to prove that they had become the monitors and gatekeepers of the CiF ideology.

In wanting to iron and hammer out the imperfections, they smashed out all the character and quirkiness it once possessed - the very reasons which made people want to go there - and skimmed the surface into ultra-smooth bland banality.

The first time I had a comment deleted, the initial reaction was not affrontedness or outrage, but simple curiosity. Why would they bother to delete something which was just a poor joke as an addendum to an earlier, more detailed post about an article besotted with the virtues of a Victorian woman, who happened to be what could very loosely be described as an explorer?

The reason the joke was deleted became clear. If every one of the six billion people on earth read the comment; if they all studiously avoided and ignored the obvious humour; if they were all, each and every one, rabid, swivel-eyed and frenzied followers of a particular religion; if they utterly missed and misinterpreted the flow and context of the comment; if they  blew it up out of all proportion, egged on and bribed by invading aliens - then, it was possible, (remotely, statistically vanishingly and stretching the robust elastic of probability to snapping point) just possible that perhaps one person over the course of a million years might be slightly offended.

The other fact was that, in the earlier and longer comment, I had stupidly suggested that, rather than lauding the dubious achievements of an aristocratic female from another age, perhaps we should look at the plight of ordinary people in the here and now.

No wonder I was done for. Wimminz, class and rubbing the nose of CiF in the fact that it basically hates the poor.

Anyway, that has been a roundabout way of saying why I am not bothering much - well, hardly at all - with this blog.

A few days away from CiF and you wonder why you ever cared.  A few more days and you forget it exists.

However, I do look at The Untrusted and it has been noted there that CiF has had to close WADDYA for the weekend.

I do not yet know why. After all, WADDYA is the flagship of the sinking CiF and Guardian fleet. It is the place where Kiz and Bru daily display their viciousness and spite and challenged intellects and then run screaming to JessicaReed if anyone says anything they dislike.

People have said that JessicaReed has had a fit of pique and has taken the WADDYA ball away from the ruffians below the line to teach them a lesson.

The lesson they might learn is that there is a great deal more to life than posting inanities and publicly displaying your own stupidities, obsessions and bigotries on WADDYA.

It may work for a day or two, Jessica, but anything longer than that and people will just wander off in droves.

Which is something which CiF and The Guardian really cannot afford, either financially or in terms of saving the gulping, glugging, gurgling HMS CiF from sinking beyond the heroic salvage of whoever is going to replace the disaster of Seaton.

PS I will post here some of the comments from UT about this.

6 Steps to Kill Your Community

Perhaps CiF should try listening to Matt Mullenweg, founder and boss of WordPress, the software which runs millions of blogs across the internet.

You know, someone who actually stands a chance of knowing what he is talking about, as opposed to an unknown cyclist from nowhere.

About a year ago, Mullenweg wrote a blog post about how to kill your online community. Again, it has to be pointed out that blogging - of which technology WordPress has always been a leader - is what made the internet social and interactive and predicated sites like CiF.

In terms of moderation, Mullenweg certainly advises against allowing a free-for-all, with its legal implications and tendency to annoy everyone into leaving. However, most arguments about CiF have never been to allow unmoderated commenting. They have simply been for the moderation to achieve both consistent and acceptable standards. Of course, according to Seaton (is he still there, by the way, or has his sideways slide taken him to wreak havoc in pastures new?) there is nothing wrong with moderation at CiF. He is right and hundreds and hundreds of people who comment are wrong.

Anyway, here are a couple of points from Matt Mullenweg, which should have such a familiar ring to the CiFerati that, when they read them, they will think they have become the clappers on the bells into which a puzzled Quasimodo is staring.

Be Famous! You’ll get thousands of comments on almost everything you post and make sure only to let through the most sycophantic and saccharine, don’t tolerate real conversation or debate. To spice it up every now and then opine on a known controversial subject like abortion and let your audience loose on each other like gladiators while you watch from the stands.

Make People Click Click Click. Ideally do 1-comment-per-page CNET-style and your pageviews will go through the roof, but if you can’t stomach that just make comments-per-page setting low or have some sort of complicated nesting scheme.

Treat Everyone the Same. If I’ve left hundreds of great comments over many years on your site, please make me wait in the moderation queue like some random stranger off Digg. Don’t let anyone know I’m a regular, or talk to me, or invite me to test out beta stuff, or pretty much anything that acknowledges my existence or shows any degree of trust.

Remember, though, if anyone from CiF Towers should catch sight of this: it is a list of what not to do!

You have to make this plain because otherwise, like New Labour thinking Nineteen Eighty-Four was a political instruction manual, the halfwits in charge of CiF will simply obey mindlessly, like they would follow whatever fashion or domestic advice is the article of faith du jour.

Everyone's A Critic: Everyone Can Be A Moderator, Too

There have been occasional claims made by various people on CiF that anyone can make comments disappear simply by using the Report Abuse button.

The claim from the staff has always been that if a comment is reported, it still has to go through the scrutiny process of the highly-skilled moderators and pass the various tests under their gimlet-eyed gaze and the stifling heat of their red-hot intellectual rigour before it is eventually jettisoned into the virtual dustbin of history.

Yeah, or just, you know, disappear without trace within seconds.

Of course, if it was true that anyone and everyone, idle passers-by and addicted CiF-junkies alike, could just depopulate the threads of comments simply because they felt like it or for malicious reasons or just because they clicked the wrong button, it would not so much dent the credibility of the whole lurching CiF charabanc as smash it to pieces and write it off completely.

So, having spent a few scattered moments of boredom, head resting on fist and eyes vacantly staring into the middle distance and randomly pressing the Report Abuse button - sometimes giving a curt reason, sometimes a snipped quote, sometimes a contrived turn of phrase and sometimes just leaving the forlorn little form blank (but always on comments which had no reason whatsoever to be deleted, given their almost offensively perfect innocence) - it can now be confirmed to the world that anyone can zap anyone's comment off the face of CiF without any training or special skills and, more importantly, with no reason whatsoever and with no intervention from the moderation team.

Of course, if you have written a good post and it then gets deleted, you might think it is both acceptable and morally justified to make a principled stand and enquire about what happened and why.

Yes, the problem, though, would be that we already know that emailing the moderators may only prompt an automatic, useless and actually provocative reply. We have been told that they are too grand to be bothered replying to mere contributors of free content.

You could try posting a question on the thread from which your poor little comment has been whisked away and murdered. Oh, except for the fact that we have also been told that all questions about moderation are off-topic and will be deleted.

Welcome to the Catch-22 world of CiF, where it is madness to complain because you have to be mad to post there in the first place.

Here are some words of wisdom from Matt Seaton from the thread which was supposed to celebrate four years of CiF censorship but ended up as a howl of protest and outrage over CiF's idiotic and useless moderbation techniques and proved Seaton (who accused JayReilly of being the "polemicists' polemicist") to be the luvvies' luvvie - and, incidentally, never actually answered JayReilly's question when evidence was brought proving that CiF moderation is an ongoing online catastrophe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/17/comment-is-free-is-four

@ Triffid100:

Nobody's going to stop you talking about moderation, and maybe it feels good to share gripes, but my response is going to be the same all day and every day: moderators follow our Talk Policy and transparent procedures when making decisions about infractions of that policy. The rules are not hard for users to follow. 

Yes, moderation is a human system which involves making judgment calls in a very fast-moving and dynamic environment, and users who feel hard-done-by are able to appeal their decisions. But our moderation staff are highly experienced and well-trained, and we have great confidence in them. 

The bottom line is follow the Talk Policy, stay within the rules and you will never even know the moderators exist. How hard is that?

....................

I accept that many of you wanted to air dissatisfactions with moderation, and I'm aware that I've not been able to say much that will have altered critical perceptions of how we do modding. I wouldn't say that we've exhausted the topic for all time, but I hope at least you feel that whereas complaints about modding in other threads will usually be treated as off-topic and deleted, here we have given full rein to the issue and you have had your say. As with everything, moderation remains a work in progress, and nothing is going to change overnight, but we do understand its importance and we know it needs all the investment of skills and people we can get. But we also see it as only one dimension of our community interface, and we'd love to move to a point where the issue just didn't loom so large as it does for some of you.

........................

No contradiction intended certainly. I do think our moderation in its general operation is as transparent as resources permit: the rules are clear and stated and mods interpret and apply them as fairly as possible. The limits of transparency arise in specific instances: judgments about banning being one, correspondence between a user and moderators over an appeal being another.

...............................

Putting that aside, the general point is that I'm not willing to debate alleged political bias on the part of moderators, because their political impartiality is simply a given. It would be a disciplinary matter if a moderator was acting on a partisan ideological basis. And that would be incredibly stupid, too, because it would be rankly obvious within the first 15 minutes.

As for individual complaints, I assume you mean over deleted posts. This is where we all have to be realistic: this site generates thousands of comments every day. Moderators are having to make hundreds of judgments about deletions every shift. They are under considerable pressure. Is their judgment flawless in every case? It can't be. But neither will it be grossly wrong; and looked at in aggregate, over time, it will be fair and reasonable. We invite appeals by email, and guarantee that all are read, but the sheer scale of the enterprise means that there cannot be a judicial process for every deleted comment as of right for users. My general advice is if you get a comment deleted, you probably have a good idea why, so move on.


You make a good point. I don't think our columnists should have to put up with mere ad hominem abuse and it is against the guidelines, as you observe. Sometimes, bad posts don't go fast enough (moderation resourcing being inevitably limited), and sometimes, perhaps, too much presumption is made in favour of free speech, with Gdn columnists just expected to be as tough as old boots and able to put up with some heckling. But you can help us by using the 'report abuse' button.

As for rightwing trolls: well, I think we have to accept that Cif is open for business to anyone who wants to visit and we're not charging the price of admission that is the £1 people pay for the newspaper. On the other hand, I think it is salutary for all us Gdn types to be exposed to views outside our comfort zone and to realise that there is a battle of ideas out there and we have to take the world as we find it, not as we might wish it to be.

So, trolls should get modded out of sight. But rightwingers? Bring 'em on: let's have the debate.

................

There endeth the lesson.

This is interesting, though:

"...there is a battle of ideas out there and we have to take the world as we find it, not as we might wish it to be."

Isn't this the very thing which The Guardian, CiF and the Matt Seaton All Stars have continuously and deliberately tried to achieve - peddling their ideology and clearing the ground of dissent in order to push it without impediment or hindrance from the filthy scum who (used to) make CiF worth reading?

All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter CiF

The Comment is Free bus keeps trundling along and shedding gems as it lurches and wobbles from one accident to another.

As someone who no longer actually posts on CiF and only visits occasionally and fleetingly, today has thrown up material for three posts, which might make up for the gaps on other days.

Anyway, it seems that usini got into an exchange about the business of trolls from the political right being allowed to break the rules to give the impression of CiF being right-on and accommodating and caring, while reasonable discussion from anywhere else gets muffled and disappears.

He asked whether any of this would change once the election is out of the way and the funny old Guardian works out where its political heart might have been buried.

Then he says this:

Hell I don't mind naming a few names but I can't remember them off hand. Next time one of the Guardian black or Asian correspondents comes on I will post them. MaM is a racist, apart from his generally ultra right views but he has been here for ages. Armaros is a ferocious anti-leftist as is tom wollacott. There are so many here now. I may end up getting modded for this post, put on pre-mod or even banned, but to be honest I couldn't care less. Sometimes I am beginning to think like Olching that the whole idea of CIF has gone so badly wrong that it should be abandoned.

Whoops!

Moments later, of course, the post, as usini predicted, was deleted by a moderator.

Mr Chekhov to the Gulag, Please!

Chekhov has this to say over on The Untrusted:

BTW: I've thrown in the towel on CIF.

They are obviously expecting me to go back with a grovelling apology, appealing for a reprieve. Well they can go and fuck themselves.

I stuck with CIF from the outset and gave it the benefit of the doubt but the Mods have ruined it.

Pity really but I suppose it was inevitable since the whole thing is run by Oxbridge fuckwits who haven't got a clue what it's like trying to survive at the "coal face"

And later:

I haven't been banned "technically". I'm in "pre mod" for calling Lord Adonis to account for his scaremongering article on splitting the left wing vote.

I didn't contravene their talk policy so there is no reason why I should have to make a grovelling apology to be allowed back in and I don't intend to do so.

Incidentally, no one seems to have missed me, and there was no collective indignation at my being ostracised, unlike Lord Summerisle who was actually banned.

However he wasn't banned for his usual reasonably thought out wisdom but for this:

"Which part of your brain do you need to have removed to become a moderator"

Anyway, like I said, It's a shame. There was the makings of a sort of on-line community on CIF and they totally fucked it up. Maybe they did it deliberately. Who knows?

Sorry, Chekhov. Obviously, you just didn't quite make it into the Air-Kiss Gang.

Do You Want To Be In My Gang?

There is a website called aSmallWorld. It is only for people who are rich and members of the international jet-set. Not for people who like to pretend that they are living in a Martini advert.

Basically, if you are reading this, you will never be invited to join - and you have to be invited, like all exclusive clubs - because your life operates at a level which is too low to be picked up by the radars of the rich and famous. You are a mere civilian.

The problem is that even with such stratospherically exclusive clubs, there have to be rules and sanctions for those who cannot comply with the codes of the blessed. 

If you make a faux pas, you are immediately jettisoned to the worst place in the known universe; a type of satellite virtual prison-ship, where there are no PAs and hangers-on and publicists and fawning lackeys: a place with the shudderingly grim name of aBigWorld.

Obviously, the threat of being cast adrift is usually enough to keep the brightest and the best in line because, like everyone else, all they want is to be loved and cuddled.

Perhaps Comment is Free is trying to adopt this approach in order to keep (not the gleaming suns and stars and flickering comets of their stellar writers above the line, of course) the filthy scum who jostle and jeer, whistle and cheer in the areas below the line, to keep them herded and fenced and in their proper place.

The problem is, it simply fails to work.

The threat of not being allowed to attend the party has now worn so thin, the party itself so boring and, er, uninviting that nobody is really bothered whether they go or not.

Groucho Marx said: "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member."

It now seems that once CiF has banned people and then tells them to jump through some hoops in order to have their wonderful privileges of providing free content to the multi-million pound Guardian Media Group restored, people respond slightly more bluntly.

Get fecked.

Jennifera30 says this:

Oh I got an email from someone at Cif saying I would be welcome back after a cooling off period but I am not sure if I want to bother.

Oh, dear. It looks like the glamour of belonging to the CiF gang has finally worn off.

How long will it be before bannings turn into pleading emails asking people to join?

CiF Banning Bandwagon

Interesting that the WADDYA crowd love a bandwagon about banning when it suits them and it concerns one they feel happy to clasp to their collective bosom, but they are never quite so sure when the whole thing is simply a matter of funny old principles and concerns someone they are actually quite keen to see removed from their little party.

The little screeches and parps of indignation range from the heady heights of AllyF all the way to, er, who is winning the competition of bottom-feeder of the year at the moment?

So, banning and the process of being brought back into the fold by begging to be forgiven - you know, like Galileo being forced to recant and retract, to prove that the sun really does orbit the earth - is something which is, like everything else in life, simply not a matter of principle.

We govern ourselves by expedience and whatever it takes to get ourselves back into the company of backslapper stardom.

In fact, advice is also given to simply change your name and go back under another pseudonym. Strictly against the rules and something which is always considered a sign of an utter wrong'un - unless it's your mates, then it's just what you do to stay in with the in-crowd.

So, as far as the WADDYA circus is concerned, banning is a mighty fine and useful tool when it picks off the people who comply with the rules but spoil the party - no comment other than you deserved it when this happens - but everyone presents an affronted face of united outrage when the vile and monstrous moderators clumsily pick one of the blessed.

Not that the CiFerati can be bought and sold like vegetables, of course.

The Banning of Jennifera30

If CiF is going to publish an article called "Rape as a Weapon of War", it seems likely that it will draw some impassioned comments. After all, this is what CiF is doing - trying to maximise comments and page views in order to get as many advert clicks as possible, in order to stop losing money hand over fist. It is simply a numbers game and a money-making ruse.

Anyway, it seems that Jennifera30 made some comments, which everyone seems to agree were quite reasonable. In fact, they were so reasonable that they led to an almost instant ban.

Pretty standard practice as far as CiF is concerned: ban the sensible posters to clear the ground so that the mouth-frothers and the air-kissers can rampage unimpeded.

So, Jennifera30 pops over to The Untrusted to ask whether this is the normal reward for providing free content for the multi-million pound media behemoth which is Guardian Media Group and discovers that, yes, it is actually company policy.

Meanwhile over on the cartoon car-crash which is WADDYA, people are clamouring for the moderators to explain why they have banned yet another poster who has not broken any rules.

Obviously, they can always fall back on their status of Papal Infallibility, conferred on them by Matt Seaton.

The problem is, if the idea of making a noise when anyone is banned catches on, rather than just the sweethearts of the lower-level staff and the social misfits who need the fix of WADDYA to function, CiF will have to open up a new section just to deal with it.

Unless, of course, the new editor decides to overturn the abuses of the Seaton regime and actually bring the moderators into line, rather than pretending they are untouchable and hiding behind their skirts every time the CiFerati get on their hind legs and squeal.

Guardians of Fickle Ideology

It seems The Guardian is quite sure about its ideologies in terms of censoring and banning anyone who questions them for years at a stretch, but as soon as an election comes along, the fickle heart of the media empire flutters and races and can only be quelled by having a meeting and a sing-song and coming to a collective decision about which party the mighty Guardian organ is going to back or back-stab and who is going to be as red-faced as a Murdoch by May 7, 2010.

Thanks to 13thDukeofWybourne  over on The Untrusted for pointing out this comment on Matt Seaton's roundup of the day's events, which were supposed to con the CiFerati into thinking that they would have an influence on the editorial line of GMG.

The Guardian's election editorial meeting  

Oh shit, I wish I'd been there. Love the picture (I printed it off to show my mum). It must have been surreal. I hope it opened with a wise woman uttering gnomic nonsense as a prayer for guidance from each participant's "inner single Somali immigrant mother". Did you stop for herbal tea and energy flapjacks made from organic oats and nettles? Were there prizes for the best knitwear? Worthiest countenance? Most uses of 'progressive' in a single platitude? And, at the end did Rushbridger knock out Cumbaya on the piano while you all trooped out dropping loose chains in a bucket for under-appreciated, transgendered pavement artists in Bolivia?

It was by MavisCoulter and, of course, it got deleted.

It may have infringed the moderation and community guidelines for other reasons, but the main one, of course, is that nobody is ever allowed to poke fun at the achingly right-on credentials of the Seaton Gang and its clustered acolytes.

The Twilight of the Ciferati

So, we have had the news that Matt Seaton is being demoted or shoved sideways or somehow moved onwards and upwards in a glittering career which seems to have consisted, during its CiF phase, of just being rude and boorish and not very good at the job.

At about the same time, we heard that Georgina Henry was also on the move for some reason, but it would take someone of more impassioned interest to remember why or where.

Now we have the news that Emily Bell is also turning her back on The Guardian and its sinking flagship, the once-mighty HMS CiF.

So, who is left in the office, who might know how to work the photocopier and can wrestle and subdue the cable which plugs CiF into the internets?

The only ones anyone really knows are Bella someone and JemimaReed, so expect the lights to be flickering on CiF by the end of the week.

Still, as long as Jaffa Cake Central (or WADDYA, to the cognoscenti) keeps functioning as a drop-in centre for misfits and fantasists, perhaps most of the ardent Ciferati fanbase will not notice.

PS Lots of bold and italics in that post - must break the habit.

Matt Seaton Out

The news over on WADDYA and The Untrusted is that Matt Seaton is sliding sideways or downwards or otherwise from his wobbly little pinnacle of editor - or something - over at CiF.

Hoo-fucking-ray!

It might even have tempted me to go back there under yet another cunning disguise, but he has so successfully ruined the place that I cannot actually imagine wanting to do so.

Your Daily Dose - Or Fix

Now that various people have mentioned this place over at The Untrusted, I shall have to see about making some efforts towards putting up a daily post - which will probably be a bit more sporadic and incompetent than Montana's efforts - so that news junkies can get their chance to shoot up and shoot off at the mouth about what is going on over at CiF in general and, perhaps, WADDYA in particular - or Jaffa Cake Central, as HankScorpio calls it.

Anyway, feel free to dump idiocies spotted, posts you have made which have been deleted and those in breach of the guidelines which are allowed to stand, along with the howlers from those charmed beings above the line, all of which go to make up the mad and magical mix of CiF's moderation policy and tactics, which are like a less elegant and more impenetrable version of Catch-22.

PS Note to AndySays: Yes, it has been going on for ages. Each time I made too much of mentioning it, I tended to get banned.

PPS If anyone wants to write things here in an ATL capacity (yes, a joke), please feel free to get in touch. See the About page.