Jeez. Just checking out my blog I see it has been about a month since the changes to blog entry submissions. I had not intended it to take as long as it has, nor did I intend for us to be in the position of approving/rejecting blog entries this long either. I am sure that we have pushed some buttons in playing this role, or for making people feel rejected, etc. - so to anyone who has had a blog entry not approved I would like to apologize. I have probably upset quite a large cross section of users across a gamut of reasons so again, I am sorry. As I stated a little over a month ago it is my intention to put the blog moderation into the hands of the community, and not the team members of this site alone. Putting the moderators of this site into the process of blog submissions was unfortunately necessary given a number of shortcomings to the initial implementation. I'd like to say thank you to the majority of users who have given us the benefit of the doubt, and to those that didn't, well I'm sure I'll hear your complaints over the new system as well ;)

In any event, tonight I laid out the steps necessary for deployment of the new site changes as related to blog entry moderation. The test run of implementing these changes took somewhere around 4 hours tonight on my local test machine so I would expect at least that long as well for when the changes are implemented on the live server. In other words, expect some downtime once these changes roll out. I had hoped to get enough done to roll out these changes tomorrow (Tuesday) night, but I will probably end up holding off another night or two so that I can figure out a few more issues related to the changes before I commit.

So, here is a brief run down of what changes are coming. I probably should spend a whole night writing up this list - explaining why we are doing it this way and not that way, or what all the benefits/drawbacks are, etc. - but rather than do that I'll just go over what you can expect and we can go from there. I can assure you I have racked my brain for the last month in trying to come up with the best solution for all, and that I have probably considered just about anything that will be thrown at me.

Goals/Considerations

• users should be able to have their own blogs that are submitted immediately and evaluated by the greater 9/11 community
• well rated blog entries should be treated as such and not buried under the rather large number of blog submissions which typically go unrated
• blog entry topics should not have to be widely accepted in order to be posted to a user's blog
• blog entries rated poorer than normal by the community should not be given the same weight as blog entries which are rated higher than normal by the community

Changes

• blog entries are no longer moderated by 911blogger.com team members, but by the community itself
• blog entries are now instantly posted without the need for delayed moderation
• default view for the blog section is now a 'recent top rated' page which shows the top rated blog entries for the last XX days (currently 5 days)
• anonymous users now see 'filtered' blog entry section which contains blog entries above a given community rating
• registered users now see 'filtered' and 'unfiltered'(all) blog entry sections
• star based voting system is now replaced with the digg style vote up/down widget (existing star ratings will be converted to up/down - see more below)

I know it doesn't sound like much, but after playing with the new site a bit tonight I am pretty psyched - mostly because the blog entries which receive the highest ratings across the community are no longer buried within a day.

As for the switch from the star based system to the vote up/down system.. I had initially gone with the star based system with the thought that the majority of users would vote an average blog entry with 5 stars, a decent one with 7 stars, a poor one with 3 stars, etc. - but the reality is quite different. As it stands right now 87% of the blog ratings are either a 10 or a 1, and 95% of the blog ratings are 8+ or 3-. What was happening with the system is that users typically wouldn't vote on a blog entry unless they really liked it, or really disagreed with it - there was little to no voting in between - perhaps in part due to the overall lack of meaning to the rating. So, the vote up/down system actually fits in better in this instance in that 95% of the votes were either very high or very low anyway. By making this switch it facilitates us to do moderation and rankings that otherwise wouldn't be possible with the existing star rating system.

With that out of the way, here are a few random site notes..

We are continually receiving invalid requests to the site, requests for pages which have never existed, and don't exist, in some form of basic denial of service attack. At first I though perhaps it was just some robot that was continually scouring our site for some invalid link that was listed on someone else's page until I noticed that these requests were making up more than half of our server requests, and were only originating from 96 different IP addresses in the same IP subset (ex: 123.123.123.XXX). In other words, 96 different IP addresses were requesting the same invalid pages over and over again. These requests were causing major overhead to the site as some of the requests were specifically to pages on the site with the largest overhead. As such the search abilities on the site have been changed such that anonymous bots can no longer continually post invalid search requests to the site to gradually bring the server to its knees. Since I first noticed it these same automated D.O.S. requests have popped up again, but at least this time I know what to look for.

I have gotten a couple of requests from users for images/banners for the site to use on forums, myspace, etc. I have promised to have these done after I have the blog moderation changes done, but that has taken longer than expected. If anyone would like to work on such banners/images please feel free to contact me.

I have received about a dozen emails regarding the activism page I put together a couple of weeks ago. I will be taking a look at these in the coming week, and would encourage people to check it out if you haven't already. What I could use most is people willing to take up a section and build up the content. If you sent in a suggestion I may ask you for your help in this area as it would be a big help. Thanks to those who have already submitted suggestions/content, I will try to update the page to reflect some of the suggestions soon.

One other issue which is still sort of up in the air is whether or not to continue to allow anonymous commenting. I have been an advocate for anonymous commenting for quite some time. There is nothing more annoying than seeing some blog write up a story about the 9/11 community only to find out that I have to register to post a response to it. Unfortunately anonymous commenters are causing issues on this site in a variety of different ways. Most notably some in the community always get a negative tone with any anonymous commenter. This is not a good thing being that the majority of the anonymous comments we get are not from intentional disrupters - people here need to stop associating anonymous commenters with provocateurs, they are not one in the same. However, I have also noticed on a couple of occasions now where the same anonymous poster will post comments on both sides of an issue, in essence hatefully arguing with themselves, as a way to provoke internal feuds. Likewise I have seen some of the now infamous shills (like Ernie) turn around and take sides on internal feuds as a way to instigate arguments. This trend is unfortunately growing it seems. So, if you have any thoughts/opinions on whether or not to discontinue anonymous comments please feel free to voice your opinion. There may be more to come on this in the future..

With that said, I'm off to sleep. If you'd like to vent your complaints about the site, or post constructive suggestions, etc. please feel free to go for it. I can't promise I will be able to respond in any timely fashion, but I will at least try to catch up with them in the evening.

Best wishes all.