Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Even the 'ick' factor is a cover for something else. Despite the pretended revulsion for 'gay' sex acts, the fact is that homosexuals do nothing sexually that heterosexuals don't do. One only has to look at the amatuer porn posted by gays and straights alike on sites like xtube.

"The real motivation of those opposed to gay rights is simply meanness. They opponents are bullies. They like being able to look down on others. They enjoy the fact that they have 'special rights' that gay people don't. In other words, the opponents of gay rights are not nice people. One doesn't have to demonize them to realize that they lack the kind of moral compass one gains from being able to empathize with others not like oneself."

-- Crookedtimber commenter JayJonson, 2009-04-12

This is about unintentionally anonymous, and signed but technically 'anonymous', comments on my journals -- mostly at Dreamwidth.

At most of the journalling sites I use, I have anonymous comments set to be screened, as a response to the spambot problem. So when you leave a comment without signing in, your comment is hidden until the next time I look and notice that I've got legitimate anonymous comments to unscreen. If you post your comment while I'm asleep or out of the house, it could be a while.

I understand that some folks really don't want to create yet another account/online-identity to keep track of, and a few people wish to specifically avoid particular sites for personal or political reasons. My first suggestion there is OpenID.

I also understand that some folks already know about and understand OpenID, and for whatever good or bad reasons really don't want to use it. To those people who are deliberately using the anonymous-comment feature and identifying yourselves in other ways, I say, thank you for sticking your name in your comments somewhere, at the bottom as a signature or at the top or in the subject line as a "hey, this is me", so that I have more clue than just word-choice and punctuation[1] to figure out which of my friends is writing, and please carry on as you have been doing.

This message is for the rest of you, who would leave not-anonymous-in-the-technical-LJ/DW-sense comments if doing so were really easy, but either don't know about OpenID or haven't gotten around to experimenting with it. Because depending on your personal threshold for the "really easy" category, it is in fact really easy[2].

That sounds like a bit of a hassle just to leave one comment, eh?

Here's the thing: you can do this once and then not worry about it.

Oh, and if you do want a DW account, I have a couple DW invite codes.

One caveat: while I was typing this I was going through all the steps to make sure I was describing things correctly, and I couldn't get it to work using my IJ identity, though commenting at DW using my LJ and CommieJournal identities worked perfectly. I don't know whether this is a temporary DNS glitch, a bug that needs to be fixed, or what.

Of course, if your comment is really just a personal note to me and doesn't need to be visible in the discussion thread, then leaving it technically-anonymous and therefore screened doesn't matter so much (though of course some sort of human-readable identification is appreciated unless you really are trying to be really-anonymous.

A separate issue regarding comments:

Ideally, I'd like all the comments on all the copies of my entries to show up together, not scattered around with some on IJ, some on LJ, and some on DW. But I also know that if I turn off commenting on all but one site, some friends are just not going to bother going to the trouble of commenting someplace other than the journalling site they call home, and I value your comments more than the convenience of seeing them all in one place ... and equally importantly, since the reason I mirror my journal to so many places at once is to avoid having all my eggs in one basket should the site I pick become evil, get bought out, suffer catastrophic failure, or wither due to founder's loss of interest, having all the comments in one place would defeat that. So until I work out a way to automatically mirror comments cleanly[3], I'm afraid any discussions my entries spark will be fragmented, with most people only seeing one fork at a time.

[1] And no, this is not a snark at the friend whose signature is punctuation -- that's clearly a signature. :-)

[2] Except for one friend who just couldn't get it to work, which warrants a bug report, but I'm not sure which site the bug report needs to be filed with.

[3] My current idea is to clone them (using the email notifications) to a central non-LJ-like site, and maintain linkages so that attempts to reply there get redirected back to an appropriate LJ-like site. I haven't worked the kinks out of the design in my head yet, and have an awful lot more pressing on my to-do list.