That's... that's Beautiful, man!

Group hug! GROUP HUG, ALL YOU KNUCKLEHEADS!!!

{rubs a tear away}

Now if they could only get a better editor for those announcements. [P]eople that having nothing better to do?

So, seriously: back some time ago you were musing over how to improve the signal-to-noise here -- I mean, in an entry; I know you must think about it more frequently than that.

It seems that some people are either abstractly worried or have personal experiences to suggest that something in MT's/WoC's structure lets Email Address info entered into the POST A COMMENT field feed the sp*m monster(s).

Me, I use gmail, and so far that devil's bargain has at least meant I never see any unfiltered sp*m to speak of: it winds up in a folder, I skim it quarterly, no huhu. So I dunno if e-addr harvesting from here is a real problem or not.

But as I've said before, not being able to easily use a backchannel makes it harder for participants to talk to Marshals privately, and it makes it just as hard for Marshals to go out of band and reason in private with posters.

So stuff blows up more easily than it might if backchannel were secure but convenient.

Any clue on how to [a] vet MT for security re: email addresses or [b] enhance WoC's infrastructure to make emailing a poster less ungainly?

I and others have also suggested that requiring registration with email confirmation tends to dampen or (mis?)shape the population in an echo-chamberish way.

But what do you think? AL? Joe?

Bueller?

Interesting that Jerome Armstrong is not jumping on the Obama-or-Blood bandwagon with his old friend Kos.

Interesting also that MyDD is threatening a crackdown obviously directed at abusive Obama supporters, after Daily Kos has purged its Clintonites.

A miniature civil war among the Netroots, to parallel the larger one in the party proper, would be tragic yet strangely entertaining.