Category: Bloggus interruptus

Oh, I ‘reported’ this, a’ight

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
“Report” your mama. …

A tip of the Mad Dog fedora — the one with the “Press” card in the hatband — to Pat O’B for noticing that, unbeknownst to Your Humble Narrator, WordPress had surreptiously installed a “Report” button next to the “Reply” button in comments.

I’d been having all manner of hassles accessing the goddamn blog this morning, and I suspect that this shameless little attempt at speech-policing may have been the culprit. When the dust finally settled I slapped up the “Don’t touch that dial!” post as a heads-up, Pat commented on same, and hey presto! We were off to the First Amendment races.

First at bat: A.I. When I asked it, “What is this ‘Report’ button that has suddenly become an option in comments on my posts?” WP’s robot buddy told me:

The Report button in comments is a WordPress.com feature that allows readers to flag comments they find inappropriate, spammy, or abusive — it helps with community moderation. It’s shown to logged-in WordPress.com users viewing your posts, and reported comments get reviewed. You can manage your comments at Comments. Want to know more about your comment settings?

Uh, no. Fetch me one of your disgusting Meat-Things® at whom I may shout, and with all possible haste. Be advised that I have my “comment settings” at “phasers on full.”

A Happiness Engineer appeared after a short wait and spake thusly:

We would like to let you know that the report button under comments is a standard feature that now comes with Comment forms, this is so that all of our users can report any content they may find harmful or inappropriate. This doesn’t mean a comment will be deleted for being reported; it will only be flagged and go through our review process.

I threw a flag on that play:

I review comments. Not you. Me. It’s my blog. I can’t begin to tell you how angry this makes me.

I was a professional journalist for 45 years. I began blogging on WordPress ages ago. Everyone who visits my site sees a disclaimer about what to expect. Anyone who acts out gets warned, then blocked.

If WordPress is going to start deciding what is “harmful or inappropriate” on my blog, the blog I pay WP for, based on some undefined “review process,” I will look into taking my tiny little bit of business elsewhere.

The Happiness Engineer divined that my little choo-choo was headed off the rails and ran up the track a ways, waving a red lantern.

When s/he/they jumped back aboard, the story was as follows:

The Report button is part of a recent update to the Akismet spam-protection settings on your site. It’s not a change to how your blog is moderated and no one at WordPress will review or override your moderation decisions. If a comment gets reported through that button, it’s simply flagged to Akismet’s spam system; it doesn’t get removed or hidden from your site.

Uh huh. I’ve edited a story or two in my time, but I usually aimed for clarification, not simply topping it off with, “Just kidding!”

Long story short: If you have a WordPress blog, and this “Report” button appears in your comments, you can remove it in your Dashboard by going to Jetpack > Akismet Anti-Spam and unchecking “Allow visitors to report spam or inappropriate comments.” This bullshit is apparently enabled by default, and fuck you very much, meep meep meep.

I thanked the Happiness Engineer for helping me deny a hall pass to rat finks, stool pigeons and informers, and then added:

Adding this “feature” without a bit of warning is insane. Please feel free to tell Management that.

Come to think of it, if you have an email address for anyone in Management to whom I could express my extreme discontent, that would be helpful. We’re a tiny little group of overeducated First Amendment types, and more than a few of us have WP blogs. We’d like to kick this matter up your food chain if you have someone handy for me to yell at.

The HE promised to “share this internally,” added that my volcanic feedback “shows how this can look very different from what was intended,” and gave me an email address which may or may not be useful: support@akismet.com.

I wonder what Akismet’s robot thinks about this? Probably too busy trolling the Meat-Things’® cloud storage for actionable intelligence. If any.

Don’t touch that dial

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
“Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?”

Is it the State? Is it the Corporation? Aren’t they both the same thing these days? With Jesus as CEO, P.T. Barnum as COO, and Michael Corleone as CFO?

Whatevs. Ye Olde Blogge has been acting out this morning for no good reason, so if all you’ve been getting is the Jolly Roger and a hearty “Stand and deliver!” when you drop by, pay it no mind. It’ll either work or it won’t, just like everything else.

Except the blog don’t cost nothin’.

The snot locker

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
There’s no escape.

Apologies for the extended hitch in the blogging gitalong.

Herself returned from Maine on Saturday with a case of The Bug, and thanks to the recent heavy rains I have been enjoying an extended allergic reaction to just about everything, including, as you have seen, bloggery.

The Boss is feeling much better now, thanks to rest, tea, posole, and television. I remember when rest, Canada Dry ginger ale, Lipton’s chicken noodle soup, and comic books did the trick for me. So it goes.

Despite a surfeit of snot I have been out and about on the Soma Pescadero, and you may expect an Adventure Cyclist-style review here in the very near future. Of the Soma, not the snot.

It’s been interesting to see how the Pescadero stacks up with the rest of the Merry Sales family — my two Soma Sagas (one rim brake, one disc); the Double Cross (my oldest Soma); and the New Albion Privateer. Marketeer Stan Pun says the Pescadero is “probably our most under-the-radar frame,” which is a pity, because it’s a smooth blend of past and present. It should be flying high.

Anyway, more on that later. Right now it’s time to ride.

Or so I hope, anyway. We have a largish fire burning at the Arizona-New Mexico border, another one freshly pissed out in an industrial district north of downtown, an air-quality alert, and a red-flag warning.

If I were smart I’d stay inside with the doors and windows shut. But if I were smart, I wouldn’t have mowed the lawn yesterday.

Right in the eggs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Cool with a side of clouds.

Whew. Looks like I picked a good week to go on a news fast. These pendejos are pitching fastballs. At this pace there won’t be a wall without shit running down it before Valentine’s Day. A lot of it won’t stick, but it’s gonna pile up. The forecast calls for deep doo.

My news fast coincided with a cold snap that kept me off the bike. I don’t object to cycling in the 30s if the sun’s out, but when Tōnatiuh abdicates in favor of Ehecatl, it’s time to go for a run.

Thing is, I’m not a runner. Not really. A runner certainly wouldn’t call me one. Especially if s/he’d caught me at it.

I can pretend for 45 minutes but that’s about it. And that doesn’t burn a lot of daylight for a fella trying to avoid the doomscrolling.

Still, I managed. For about four days. Who can avert his or her eyes while passing a domestic disturbance in daylight or an unshaded window at night? This is like driving past a five-car crash without checking the gutters for rolling heads.

So I eased back in, slowly. A little Kevin Drum. Then a bit of Charlie Pierce. This is akin to reading the police report, if Joseph Wambaugh wrote it. The Atlantic, for a soupçon of button-down viewing with alarm.

Finally, I hit the hard stuff. The New York Times. Holy shit, etc.

I hope the rubes who elected this bozo are enjoying the shitshow. Looks like it’ll be a good long while before he gets those egg prices down.

Fall

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Oh, the days dwindle down, to a precious few. …

There hasn’t been much time for bloggery lately, with Herself’s sisters in town for an extended visit.

Having four females in the house, a fella hardly gets a minute to catch his breath, much less his thoughts.

To be fair, Miss Mia Sopaipilla likewise found her routine disrupted. The three sisters held their morning war councils at the kitchen table, which is the second step of Miss Mia’s ascension to the countertop, the first step being a stool. So instead of being all cute on the countertop she’d find some acoustically appropriate corner of El Rancho Pendejo to announce her annoyance.

Man, does her voice ever carry. Miss Mia may be a senior citizen, but she can still hit the high notes.

Anyway, that’s my excuse for the lack of “content” around here lately. (The fine weather for cycling may have played some small role.) We’re down one sister as of this morning — Heather flew back to Tennessee — but Beth will be with us for a couple more days, so I anticipate a continuing hitch in my digital gitalong.

The good news is, you can fill the lonely hours with the latest from Hal Walter, who is collaborating with son Harrison on a project that is something of a work in progress. “The Blur Goes to College: Full Tilt Boogie Too” is intended to be a book, eventually; in the meantime, they’re rolling it out on Substack, in serial form. Writes Hal:

It’s part comedy and part tragedy, part train wreck, part triumph. Moreover, this is a story of empathy and compassion, and exploring the rights of people with so-called “intellectual disabilities.” We wanted to get the story out as soon as possible. We hope you enjoy this serialized rollout on Substack as we finish the book and eventually get it into print.

If you enjoy what you see, you can subscribe to have chapters delivered by email. If you’d like to support the project, donations are gratefully accepted via Venmo @Hal-Walter (phone# 8756).