I’ve added two new checkbox plug-ins.¹

The first is a “subscribe to comments” plug-in (I’ve had this one before, but it got dropped at some point and was never restored). This is one I’ve found useful when I’ve left comments on a blog that I don’t visit often.

The second is the Comment Rules Wordpress Plugin, which Daran of “Feminist Critics” created by modifying an already-existing plugin.² Here’s a picture of the new plugin at work:

Because this notice appears right by the comments box - rather than dozens of screenfuls of comments away, which is where the old notice appeared — I think this should limit or eliminate the problem of non-feminists forgetting about the rule in the longer threads. It’ll also take some burden off of the moderators to enforce the rule, since I think the checkbox requirement will make it more self-enforcing.

Many thanks to Daran; especially considering his idealogical aversion (to put it mildly) to feminism, it was extremely generous of him to make this plugin at my request.

1. I’ve also added a third plugin, which will mean more pingbacks will be registered, but it means I have to register “Alas” with Technorati. In order to do that, I need to put this link in a post temporarily: Technorati Profile. Just ignore that link, please. (back)
2. The already-existing plugin Daran modified was Comment Policy Wordpress Plugin, by George Notaras. (back)

Nexy reports that’s she’s been having problems leaving comments on “Alas” and other wordpress blogs. She’s not the only one; I’ve had similar reports from Jake Squid and Defenestrated.

It’s normal for comments to sometimes be put into moderation; when that happens, you should see a notice saying that the comment is in moderation. But what’s happening to some posters is that their comment just fails to appear, without any notice at all. When this happens, the most likely culprit is the Akismet spam-blocker, which is now automatically built into Wordpress blogs.

If this has been happening to you a lot, you might want to go to the Akismet contact form to let them know you’re not spam.

If you think Akismet has mistaken a comment you left on “Alas’ for spam, please email to let me know immediately and I’ll try to rescue it. But it’s important to contact me quickly — I get over 400 spams a day, so I can only find yours while it’s near the top of the pile. “Akismet” is supposed to be learning software, so if I keep rescuing your comments and telling it that you’re not a spammer, eventually it should get the idea and stop mistaking your comments for spam.

If nothing else works, you can also email me a comment and I’ll post it for you.

* * *

Meanwhile, blogspot has been keeping me and (I suspect) many other people from posting comments — the word verification image isn’t loading (Nexy has a screenshot), and neither is the disabled access alternative verification. If you have a blogspot blog, you should consider turning word verification off.

(Of course, by the same token, I could turn Akismet off. For me, 400+ spam comments a day is enough so that I need a spamcatcher that’s genuinely effective at catching almost all the spam, and Akismet really is better than any other spamcatcher I’ve tried. But it’s my impression that I get more spam than many bloggers do.)

A couple of people reported that the “live comment preview” function was slowing down their browsers, so I’ve replaced it with an Ajax-based comments preview. This has the advantage of live preview in that you don’t have to reload the page to preview your comment; but since the comments preview isn’t activated until you press the “preview comment” button, people can choose to opt out if it messes up their browser.

I’m having a layout problem, though… As you can see if you scroll down to comments, the “preview comment” button is slightly lower than the “submit comment” button. I’d prefer to have them at the same height. If you know how to fix this, please clue me in. I’ve put a copy of my comments.php file here, so folks can take a look at it.

I’m trying to revamp the moderation over at my site, Rachel’s Tavern. As I frequently mention, I get many racism apologists, unorganized white supremacists, organized white supremacists, and colorblind racists stopping through my site. Once they are combined with the random misogynists and general bigots, I have about a million haters.

I was thinking about doing the same thing as Amp does with threads that are open only to feminist and feminist friendly posters only applying it to race instead. Maybe I could do threads open only to anti-racists or anti-racist friendly posters. I realize that many regular commenters get frustrated and scared away when too many of these racism apologists/white supremacists/colorblind racists start coming around. It is frustrating because that is the desired effect of these haters–to shut this site down and scare people away. I am happy that at this point I have a bunch of spunky commenters who take these people on, especially since I can’t be sitting around at every moment responding to all of them.

But what do you think?

Certainly, one of the problems I’m going to face is that nobody ever thinks that they are a racism apologist/white supremacist/color blind racist, so I might have to change the wording. Any suggestions?

I’m also curious how well people think the feminist only/profeminists threads work here at Alas. Do you think it works?

I should note that I am not making any suggestions for changing Alas. This is for my site Rachel’s Tavern, but I feel it would be nice to see what others think about how this has worked over here at Alas.

I feel a bit guilty; I’ve been neglecting “Alas” lately. Partly it’s that I have the flu that is (so it seems) never, ever going away; partly it’s a minor crisis at home (basement flooded, water damage everywhere, contractors contractors contractors). Whatever it is, lately I just feel no drive to blog.

So I’m taking a break until I do feel like blogging. Which will probably be shortly after this flu goes away. In the meantime, I might do some extremely light posting - baby blogging, sketch blogging, that sort of thing. We’ll see how it goes.

Keep yourselves well, folks. :-)

Ta-da! My ten favorite posts written by me in 2006. (I’m not going to attempt to rank the posts of other “Alas” contributors - but Maia has already done a “best of Maia 2006” post, and perhaps Rachael will do the same.)

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been extremely lax about enforcing the “feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly” threads lately. I’m making a somewhat early new year’s resolution to stop being lax.

Here’s the relevant bit of blog policy:

Please note that some posts are marked as “feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only.” [If you’re not in those categories,] Please do not post comments on those posts. The purpose of this policy is to allow some intra-feminist conversations to take place on “Alas,” while still leaving other conversations open to non-feminist participation. Please respect the spirit of this policy, and not just the letter. Attempts to play “rules lawyer” will not be well taken by the moderator.

I’m particularly disappointed at non-feminists who have been regular comment-writers here long enough to know the policy, but who still ignore it. You should know better. If you have a response to a “feminist only” thread you want to post on “Alas,” you may do so in an open thread. Or you can take it to your own blog.

I’ve hesitated to enforce “feminist only” threads — or to moderate in any way at all — in discussions following posts written by folks other than me. That’s been the policy, and I think there were good reasons for it. But I think it’s time to experiment with a change.

So from now on, I’ll feel free to moderate when it seems like an easy call to me (such as telling obviously non-feminists to get out of a feminist-only thread), even if it’s not my thread. When moderation questions are more ambiguous, I’ll leave it to the blogger who started the thread to make the call, but in some cases I’ll put questionable comments into the “needs to be approved” area until the thread-starter has a chance to take a look at it.

At the same time, I have a life outside of this blog. Sometimes I don’t read “Alas” for ten or twenty hours at a time, or more if I’m doing something like plane travel. And sometimes I’m just plain absent-minded. So there are going to be comments that slip through unmoderated. So I’ll ask “Alas” readers to help me out by sending me email if you think there’s a comment I should be concerned with. It’s extra-helpful if you can include some specifics to help me find the comment you mean — for example, by quoting a paragraph of it.

Hey, all! We’re having serious networking issues at my house, so my access to the series of tubes we call an internet is going to be somewhere between non-reliable and nonexistent for a while. So moderation here may be extra-slow for a while (although perhaps the other bloggers will pick up that slack!), and I may not be reading my email regularly until this problem is fixed.

Meanwhile, I’ll be reading comics and watching TV. Poor me! :-P

UPDATE: Akismet says that the bug causing the false positives has been fixed. Original (now, I hope, moot) post is below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m happy to announce that Marcella, who blogs at the excellent Abyss2Hope, will be returning to “Alas” for guest-blogging from now through the end of the year. Yay!

Sorry, folks… I’m working on it.

UPDATE: You can leave comments again; we think we may have licked this problem for good now. We’ll see.

(The vacation is really nice, by the way. There was a party last night; we carved pumpkins and played silly games and danced with infants and sat around a bonfire. When I’m home, if she gives me permission, I’ll post a pic of Meg’s insanely great tree pumpkin. My life should be like this more often.)

In the summer of 2005, my financial situation, which had been shaky for months, finally reached critical point. A letter came from my bank demanding immediate repayment of everything I’d borrowed on pain of court action, and I knew I had no means of finding the necessary sum within the time they were willing to grant me.

I ran through an inventory of my assets, which didn’t take long. The most valuable thing I owned was my computer, and I’d only bought it for a tenth of the sum the bank was now demanding. Desperate, I started to wonder what an able-bodied white baby would fetch in a black-market paid adoption and whether I would be able to find a prospective buyer willing to make a down-payment while the baby was still in utero.

So I know what financial difficulties can do to a person’s thought processes, and that’s why I’m not rushing to criticise Amp for his decision to sell amptoons.com. If I’d owned a valuable domain back then and received the offer Amp received, I probably wouldn’t have even stopped to wonder what they would use it for.

I’m sticking around, but I know some people would prefer not to read or link to Alas now because of this connection. Some of these are people whose opinions I respect and whose comments I would hate to miss, so I’m going to start reposting the bulk of my Alas posts on my personal blog, The Iron-On Line. They will doubtless end up buried among memes, one-liners and updates about my life, but I hope people who can’t forgive Amp for this sale can still join in the discussion.

I’m going to be on vacation for a bit over a week, seeing some old friends and some past housemates. I’m not sure how much internet access I’ll have while traveling, but I expect it’ll be limited. I’ve written a few posts ahead, and there’ll be (I hope) posts from Rachel and Maia. But while I’m away, comments that get stuck in moderation may wait longer than usual to get approved, and my email answering may be even slower and less reliable than usual. Sorry ’bout that.

I was 21; I’d been politically active for a couple of years and made some decisions. One was that I wasn’t going to ‘hold paper clips for evil’ (that’s the exact phrase I used in my head). This had been relatively easy, because up till then, apart for some administrative work, most of my earnings had been from babysiting and nannying.* I needed money, so I went to a temp agency to see if I could get any admin work.** I’d thought about what I’d do if they offered me something I found repugnant, and I decided I’d pretend I was busy. I was really excited to get my first job, excited and nervous. I was to type plans for an architecht - that sounded OK I thought, that sounded compatible with my politics. Everything was going fine until I got there and I was given the plans that I was supposed to type.

They were plans for a prison.

I could have left, I would never have worked for the temp agency again, but that wouldn’t have been the end of the world. I wasn’t on the bones of my ass, but I wanted to get more work, I didn’t know what I was doing next and I wanted to work.

That was hardly the only time I’ve done things I disagreed with. I’ve typed up letters telling large corporations how to avoid paying their taxes, I’ve done admin to help a temping agency figure out who they’re employing on the railways (undermining union labour - in many ways this is the one I feel worst about), I’ve put out invitations for an event the WTO was holding, and I’ve even worked for the New Zealand Defence Force. I’ve also been the benefactor of an income stream that makes everywhere I’ve personally worked look as ethical as working full-time for a revolution (as the Red Queen probably wouldn’t say).

So when I say that I am still blogging here, and don’t have a problem with what Amp did, that’s not because I don’t hate the sites that are being promoted. The fact that women’s bodies are a commodity, things to be bought and sold, upsets and depresses me. The fact that some people see my body, the one I live my life in, as an object - scares me.

Instead, it’s because I hate everything. Every object we make, everything we do, is perverted by a system that puts profit before people, by misogyny that is tearing a little bit out of all our souls, by the way we suck the resources, not just out of foreign lands, but from the marrow of the bones of the people who live there - and then tell them what’s wrong with the way that they live, by the many other ways we organise our world and stop people from being frree.

There’s no way out of participating in that - not for anyone.

This probably sounds despairing, it’s not meant to be. Like Natasha from Feminish I believe another world is possible. I just don’t think we bring it about through what we do individually. If we’re going to create that world that I have to believe is an alternative to this one then it’s going to be because of what we do collectively. We each have to play a role in the various machines at the moment, but that doesn’t stop us, when we’re strong enough and organised enough from pushing those machines over.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have bottom lines. Every one of us will have things we wouldn’t do, actions that we couldn’t live with ourselves if we took. There are always places where we have to take a stand, not because we believe it’ll change the world, but because taking that stand is the only way we can make it clear who we are and what we believe. I understand and respect that for many women linking to this site is something that they can no longer do. I just wanted to try and explain why I felt differently.

* See my analysis wasn’t nearly as developed as my sense of self-righteousness. I have a huge political problem with child-care as a luxury item. I don’t think that if parents want an evening off (or not to be prosecuted after school or during the school holidays - which was a lot of the work I did), they should have to pay through the nose.

** I certainly should have had an analysis of temping agencies as a way of getting around labour legislations and essential to the casualisation of the labour market, but I don’t think I did.

Regarding the sale of Amptoons.com (which I posted about last month), Hugo writes:

Barry, you owe your readers a public forum where you can further explain your decision, and offer those who are stunned and hurt an opportunity to express that to you directly.

It’s the right thing to do, and it needs to happen right now.

Okay. Here’s the same post, this time with the comments open.

* * *

Announcement: I’m not the owner of “Amptoons.com” anymore. I sold it a couple of months ago.

Five months ago, I was facing two problems. First of all, I was in real financial trouble - we were paying all our bills, but by a slimmer margin each month, and if things had kept on going that way it was only a matter of time before we’d come up short. Plus, one person in the house hadn’t been able to pay his rent in a long time, while another seemed on the verge of being unemployed (although as it turned out, that was a false alarm).

Second of all, I kept on having to beg my host not to shut down “Alas” for using too much server time - and in fact, “Alas” was briefly shut down more than once, and I was forced to remove a lot of functionality in order to reduce server load. My host kept on telling me that I needed a dedicated server, but the cost of that is well beyond anything I could consider.

Then a buyer approached me offering to purchase amptoons.com, so he could use it to improve search engine rankings for his clients (how that all works isn’t something I have any knowledge of). He offered a substantial sum of money - not enough to erase my money worries, but enough to ease the pressure for a while. Plus he offered to provide a free dedicated server for “Alas.”

The contract took months to wrangle, but here’s the bottom line: The new owner has absolutely no control over the content of “Alas.” However, “Alas” plus my cartoonist pages are the only parts of amptoons.com I have any access to or control over. The buyer also has the right to put in one or two inconspicuous links on “Alas,” positioned in a way that would make it unlikely that anyone but search engine robots would follow the link.

I was assured by the buyer that he would never host porn sites on “amptoons.com.” And I wrote into the contract that his link on “Alas” could never be a direct link to a porn site. But beyond that, I have no ability to control what the buyer does with his pages - the deal is that he has absolutely no say in what’s on “Alas,” but we also agreed that I have no say over what he does with his own property. And - as a couple of “Alas” readers have noticed - some pages I don’t own include links to porn.

[Edited to add: A couple of readers have speculated that I didn’t know that the new owner would link to porn on his pages. That’s not true; I kept the links off of “Alas,” but I knew that he would be putting links to porn on his own pages.]

I’m essentially in the same position as someone with a blog on “blogspot.com” - I don’t own the domain, and although I control what’s on my own blog, I don’t have any say over what’s posted on the domain other than my little piece of it.

I realize that some “Alas” readers will feel that I’ve sold out, or that this puts me beyond the pale. I’m genuinely sorry for that. For the record, I don’t feel I’ve been victimized (as one person suggested in email), nor do I feel like I’m a total sell-out. What I feel is this: I’ve made a compromise, one that I probably wouldn’t have made in a perfect world.

That’s all. And now, back to your regularly scheduled political rants.

* * *

New comments from Amp:

I warned the new owner that a likely result of this sale would be many other blogs delinking “Alas.” He said that didn’t matter to him and wouldn’t impede his profit; whatever his business model is based on, he isn’t concerned about that.

My views on porn: I’m not terribly pro-porn; most porn, like most mass media, seems sexist and harmful to me. The arguments that porn prevents rape or is in some way tremendously beneficial to society strike me as not at all supported by the evidence. On the other hand, I’m also not especially anti-porn, in that I don’t see porn as being particularly separate from or different than regular mass media, either in how sexist and racist it is, or in the harm it does. I’m convinced that there are other problems far, far more pressing than porn, and I think what I’ve written about over the years reflects that. If all porn disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow, I think that sexism, misogyny, and the wage gap would continue uninterrupted.

As I understand it, from the questions I asked before selling “amptoons.com,” the practical outcome of what the new owner does is that when someone searches for “porn,” they’re more likely to find his clients’ sites than other clients’ sites. I’m not thrilled with that, but I also frankly don’t believe it makes the world a worse place if porn company A gets ranked above porn company B in porn searches. Nor do I believe that I could have prevented such manipulations from taking place by refusing to sell the domain.

For me, this compromise is similar to the compromise I’ve made in the past accepting pay for cartoons from small publications who depended on strip club and escort ads for their income; or for being a secretary for various firms on Wall Street (some of those firms do, in my view, far more harm than porn ever has).

I’m not saying what I did was great. It wasn’t. It was a compromise, one that I felt I had no choice but to accept. It’s not something I would have done if I thought I could afford not to do it. It’s a bad thing, disturbing to me, and understandably disturbing (or much worse than disturbing) to my anti-porn readers. I know that some people who formerly liked me will now have lost all respect for me. I understand that, and I regret their departure; at the same time, my respect for them is undiminished.

That said, I’ve never been big on the politics of personal purity. It’s hard to be sure, because I’ve written thousands of blog posts and comments, but I don’t think I’ve ever criticized another feminist for being insufficiently pure in their personal life, their porn use, their income source, or the ads on their blogs.

* * *

One criticism of me that I think is especially strong is that I should have announced the sale of amptoons.com before it happened, to give people a chance to comment and to give other bloggers the chance to delink. It was wrong of me not to do that, and I sincerely apologize for that.

“Alas” reader “Curious” has usefully posted many links to other bloggers criticizing me on this thread. Some of the bloggers are people who have, as “Achilles and Patroclus” says, “the same folks who have been berating Amp for being insufficiently feminist for literally years now”; but others are people who have been quite kind to me over the years, and who I don’t think are knee-jerk Amp-bashers.

* * *

Comments are open for discussion (very much including criticism), but the usual moderation policies apply. Also, I want to remind people that I’m not at the computer all the time, so it may be many hours before I read comments.

This thread is for feminists, feminist-friendly, and pro-feminist posters only.

My month of Alas blogging seems to have expired already. Many thanks to Amp for the invitation, and to everyone else for welcoming me and engaging in conversation with me. It wasn’t all pretty, but they were all discussions I wanted to have and learn from. Which I did. I am.

Remember to check out that first ever Disability Blog Carnival at Penny’s on October 12. Or submit something yourself by October 9.

And stop by my site sometime, will ya? Thanks again.

Comments are working again.

It’s all a bit mysterious to me, since I don’t know what went wrong or what fixed it. I’ll update this post if I ever get a clue. But in the meanwhile, it’s good that comments are working.

UPDATE: It turns out that the server was overloaded - they restarted Apache and cleaned the MySQL tables and that did the trick. I’ll try to prevent this happening in the future.

Sorry, folks - the “Alas” comments aren’t working, and I don’t know why. This appears to be a recurrence of the comments problems we were having at the end of August. I’ve emailed someone smart and asked him to take a look at the problem; hopefully it’ll be short-lived this time.

By the way, new header. Hope y’all like it - I was tired of the old header and wanted a change-up.

Anyhow, “Studio 60″ …It was all right. Not as funny as “Sports Night” or the early “West Wing,” but the first episode was all set-up, so maybe it’ll get sharper as it goes along.

The oddest thing for me, watching the premiere episode, is that I’m a Kristin Chenoweth fan - so I couldn’t help noticing that a major character in “Studio 60″ (Matthew Perry’s ex-girlfriend) is based on Chenoweth. That must be very odd for her. Still, nice to see a positive Christian character on TV. Maybe as the series goes on they’ll add a second non-white character.

UPDATE: See also (or see instead, really) this post.

Announcement: I’m not the owner of “Amptoons.com” anymore. I sold it a couple of months ago.

Five months ago, I was facing two problems. First of all, I was in real financial trouble - we were paying all our bills, but by a slimmer margin each month, and if things had kept on going that way it was only a matter of time before we’d come up short. Plus, one person in the house hadn’t been able to pay his rent in a long time, while another seemed on the verge of being unemployed (although as it turned out, that was a false alarm).

Second of all, I kept on having to beg my host not to shut down “Alas” for using too much server time - and in fact, “Alas” was briefly shut down more than once, and I was forced to remove a lot of functionality in order to reduce server load. My host kept on telling me that I needed a dedicated server, but the cost of that is well beyond anything I could consider.

Then a buyer approached me offering to purchase amptoons.com, so he could use it to improve search engine rankings for his clients (how that all works isn’t something I have any knowledge of). He offered a substantial sum of money - not enough to erase my money worries, but enough to ease the pressure for a while. Plus he offered to provide a free dedicated server for “Alas.”

The contract took months to wrangle, but here’s the bottom line: The new owner has absolutely no control over the content of “Alas.” However, “Alas” plus my cartoonist pages are the only parts of amptoons.com I have any access to or control over. The buyer also has the right to put in one or two inconspicuous links on “Alas,” positioned in a way that would make it unlikely that anyone but search engine robots would follow the link.

I was assured by the buyer that he would never host porn sites on “amptoons.com.” And I wrote into the contract that his link on “Alas” could never be a direct link to a porn site. But beyond that, I have no ability to control what the buyer does with his pages - the deal is that he has absolutely no say in what’s on “Alas,” but we also agreed that I have no say over what he does with his own property. And - as a couple of “Alas” readers have noticed - some pages I don’t own include links to porn.

I’m essentially in the same position as someone with a blog on “blogspot.com” - I don’t own the domain, and although I control what’s on my own blog, I don’t have any say over what’s posted on the domain other than my little piece of it.

I realize that some “Alas” readers will feel that I’ve sold out, or that this puts me beyond the pale. I’m genuinely sorry for that. For the record, I don’t feel I’ve been victimized (as one person suggested in email), nor do I feel like I’m a total sell-out. What I feel is this: I’ve made a compromise, one that I probably wouldn’t have made in a perfect world.

That’s all. And now, back to your regularly scheduled political rants.

(Comments are closed on this thread. If you want to talk to me about this, please drop me an email.)