Idiot censorship/filter protesters!!!

So many bleeping idiots!  The government was putting a toe in the water of improved electronic consultation, and so many people bit the toe off (rather than wait a bit for at least an entire leg to become available).

What will their grandkids think?

What’s the chance these bleeping idiots commenting off-topic have either scared the pollies ****less of the whole idea, overwhelmed some poor junior public servant who had been assigned to look after the moderation (expecting one or two comments a day), or both?

Seriously, I’ve got to wonder how mature these off-topic commentators are, even though I agree with their opinions on the censorship/filtering issue.  With friends like these, who needs enemies?

If they’d bothered reading the moderation rules, they’d realize that it would be entirely legitimate to send most of them to /dev/null for being outrageously off-topic.  (This would be politically dangerous… I’d be hacking around under the hood to move them all to a stub post specifically for off-topic comments on censorship/filtering.)

Besides, those comments, at least once published, are in the national archives for ever… and the grandkids will be able to look at them and point out what idiots their grandparents were.

And if this first step scares the pollies and uber-conservative public servants, they’ll have the ammo to hit the progressive staffers and public servants for six and delay the improvements.  The idiot comment posters (there were a few good ones, very few) have spoilt things for everybody, including themselves – although the anti-democratic types will be thanking them for it.

As Lyn at Public Opinion notes (2008-10-10) these are delicate beginnings….

which probably means we should be nice if we want it to continue.

Just to remind you… a snippet from the moderation rules:

Comments that do not comply with our Moderation Policy will not be published to the blog and if DBCDE becomes aware of a published comment that does not comply with the Moderation Policy, we reserve the right to remove it…. To ensure that this experience is productive for everyone, please ensure that you do not post any material that a reasonable person would consider:

• …
• is defamatory, abusive, harassing or hateful
• …
• is far off-topic

Pretty clear, isn’t it!?!

When I said we needed to get off our collective arses and interact, I didn’t mean go off half-arsed!

It’s almost worthwhile saving and editing the comments from the dbcde.gov.au pages, extracting the names of the idiots, and publishing them here in a hall of shame.  Perhaps I’ll do that!  You’ve been warned!

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Elsewhere: Jacques Troppo comments on CT abount this experiment.

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p.s. Massive headache and partial seizures hitting me big time, meaning I’ll probably be completely off-line for a couple of days, but I had to get this “you bleeping idiots” post out.