This blog, unlike many, likes and encourages discussion. That’s the English professor in me. Also the fan of classical education, which holds that talking about something in a back-and-forth-exchange (that is to say, dialectic) is the best way of understanding it.
You may have noticed that the comments in the Patheos family of blogs are not nearly so troll-like, so obscene, so deliberately offensive as in other sites. Here at Cranach that is mainly due to the high level of you subscribers, many of whom have been reading and discussing this blog for lots of years, to the point that we actually know each other. Plus, since Patheos has put this blog behind a paywall, that walls out the trolls, most of whom don’t want to pay for the privilege of trolling.
Another reason for the relatively high tone of the comments on Patheos blogs as a whole is that the commenting software that is being used is Disqus, which has the feature of using an extensive list of banned words–their term is “restricted words”–that will prevent a comment that uses them from showing up. That includes the usual George Carlin list of words you can’t say on TV (but you mostly can on today’s streaming video), but also some words that are quite innocent. Some of them might be used in a non-innocent context, but some of the banning is inexplicable.
I remember one discussion of the doctrine of the Incarnation we had here that was thwarted by Disqus because people kept referring to how God has come in the “flesh.”
At any rate, we have been complaining about this for a long time. The issue came up against on yesterday’s post. So I had a heart-to-heart exchange with the main editor at Patheos. I wrote about it and reported on it in the comments. But I saw this morning that it hadn’t shown up BECAUSE IT WENT INTO MODERATION! The list–now enhanced by Artificial Intelligence?– is getting wise to the attempts to hide forbidden words, such as “beer” and “inquiries.”
So I will share my comment here for all to see:
Friends, I had a good exchange with my editors at Patheos about our frustrations with Disqus. I learned, for example, that some of the banned words are designed to thwart advertisers and spammers. That Lutheran beverage made with hops and malt, which I dare not name, is on the list for that reason. I said that I knew that I have lived a sheltered life, so I didn’t realize that “I-N-Q-U-I-R-I-E-S” had some kind of obscene connotations. I was told that it was on the list because of the phrase “serious inqu***s only.”
But here is what you need to know: Comments that include words on this list are not banned as such. Rather, they go into “moderation.” That is, they go into limbo until they can be scrutinized and, hopefully, approved. I sporadically do that, but the problem is that by the time I attend to it, the discussion is often over, and the commenter doesn’t realize that what was said shows up after all. Because of my other commitments, I can’t always keep up with this. I’ll try to do a better job of moderating, and my editor said that he would help, which I greatly appreciate.
UPDATE: I also learned that a comment that includes multiple links is also likely to go into moderation, due to the possibility of advertising.
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