Rance is back for a quick one, and sounding a bit anxious about the next step: how to keep blogging without getting bogged down with hundreds of comments per post. He wants to preserve the community that’s sprung up; dang me if he isn’t surprised and touched that there is one.
I commented that David could set up a mailing list, but that other community members (hee! that’s us!) might prefer something more like a discussion forum or board, or find some other way to moderate comments so as to take the load off the AS.
Of course, I still think he could switch to Blogger, which is free, anonymous, has fairly decent commenting and is easy to configure. I think there might be a moderation option of some sort, too. However, getting several dozen comments per post might still overwhelm it – don’t know.
What do you guys think? Is there any interest in heading in the direction of a group-moderated blog such as Fark or BoingBoing or Slashdot? or figuring out how to use any of the various free or free-ish scripts for creating moderated or unmoderated discussion forums?
Am I nuts for offering to host a mailing list, knowing that I’d be probably be stuck being List Goddess? Yep. Fortunately, it’s likely a moot point, since my impression is that R would prefer to have some control over the moderating process.
I could be wrong – he may be happy to hand over moderating responsibilities to the ravening masses (us again, whee!) and let us handle the interpersonal stuff by our own big selves.
One last note: the AS may wish to check out how they handle things over at high-traffic blogs such as Making Light , where Teresa has comments threads hundreds of posts long. Also: AAR doesn’t have comments, but Al Franken’s blog does – it routinely gets about 400 comments per piece. Caveat: a lotta trolls, and not much control other than IP banning. Both of the preceding blogs are MT installations, requiring the use of a haxor dude or dudette familiar with the ins and outs of Moveable Type for the initial setup. And there would need to be a hosting service. Meh. Probably too much to bother with in the interests of preserving anonymity.
Smart Ken has a very nice site, with a good interface for comments. What’s that software you’re using, Ken?
Edited to add: this excellent lighter. We’ll keep the Zippo lit for ya, R.
.^
/M\
\()/
_|_
[ R ]
| A |}
| N |
| C |
[_E_]
you need to find another hobby!!! 🙂
Well, if you don’t “get” Rance, I suppose it would look that way. 😉
I like your new formatting with the wider center text column: much easier to read. The monkey photos were amazing, too. Thanks for that link.
I enjoy the idea of a forum for maintaining contact with certain members of the community that allows for more interaction than email, but as far as R himself is concerned… well, if he is intent on performing a sort of reverse-alchemy to turn all this gold to base metal, then I’m afraid he will succeed. I will regret it but choices have consequences for good and bad results, and I defend an individual’s right to make a choice. Including myself.
He may simply be too busy, and I can respect his attempts to keep something going rather than simply abandoning it. Frankly, if he really is celebrity, he’s one in a thousand, because 999 of them would have opted for “abandon” as soon as it got to be a bore or a chore.
Not our R. He’s too conscientious for his own good.
Glad the design is working better for you. It was quite the struggle, and some things are still not quite right using Mozilla. It’s still probably too “busy,” so some things may get relegated to the “about” page just to make it simpler (and load faster).
Hi Ginny
You can get the code for my blog from http://www.boastology.com/.
There are some things I had to tweak in the code to get it to work more to my liking. It was written by a 16 year old kid in India. If he keeps it up, he will have a fine career programming.
Ken