There's been a large surge in comments at Popehat this year. That's good, and I appreciate it. We've made new friends and acquaintances, had some robust debates (or hosted them, more accurately), and seen some excellent points.

There's also been typical blog-comment behavior of sorts we'd like to minimize here. Enough said.

I simply don't have the time to hand-moderate when posts generate scores or hundreds of comments. When I don't have time to moderate comments on controversial posts, it makes me at least slightly less inclined to write them. There are certain types of turds I'd prefer not to leave on my living room carpet.

So. Talk to me about comment moderation, with a focus on any WordPress plugins you like. Maybe something with self-moderating elements like comment voting?

(By the way, right now, first-time commenters have their comments held in moderation, which I tend to handle reasonably quickly; nobody else is held in moderation. I tend to publish unless it is spam or straight-up douchtastic in a manner I don't want in my own living room.)

I'm not interested in Facebook comments or other methods that eliminate reasonable opportunities for semi-anonymity (that is, I'd be OK with requiring a working email address, but not with requiring a real name).

If you would like to use this post as an opportunity to lose an argument about the difference between my living room and a streetcorner under the public forum doctrine, please feel free.

It is now a cliche that writing "sorry I haven't been blogging" is a grotesque party foul akin to dropping trou and taking a dump in the punchbowl, so I shan't do that. Besides, there's no reason to be sorry, because nobody is entitled to my writings. (Or perhaps it would be better to say more ambiguously that nobody deserves my writings.)

Suffice it to say that I'm on a hiatus. At least one very major component of this is a surge of work: new cases, some on short fuses, with huge volumes of all-day tasks, leaving very little time or energy to write insightful things and/or punchbowl-crapping jokes.

That's not the only component, of course. It varies from day to day. Suffice it to say that there are days when a blank page is an unspeakably forebidding gulf. I can dive into that gulf out of duty — like for clients — but I don't have a duty to you, gentle reader, as it turns out.

I could talk more about that. Certainly other people do, and have, and I admire them for it. But recently I feel less inclined to talk about personal things. I've always been more of a life-details slut than my co-bloggers, which very arguably represents good judgment on their part. I'm pretty sure Patrick and David and Clark haven't had web pages put up accusing them of being probable child molesters and trash-talking about their families. Yes, my inclination to write about some things is impaired by the fact that through my writing here, and related pro bono activites, I've accumulated a small but noisy number of vile and bad-crazy stalker-trolls. Even when I am moved to write about something personal, I pause and think — how might these trolls use this against me? Even if I write only metaphorically —

– will the troll-stalkers be incorporating it into their deranged and threatening faxes to my managing partner, or sending it to the California State Bar, or writing odd web pages about it linked to my name? My preferred response is "screw you, I'm writing it anyway." But that's not where I am just at the moment. Not today.

I'll be back. My hiatus will end — in part when this surge of work ebbs. Other things, too, have their natural ebb and flow.

For now, tell me this: are there things that you won't write about now because of your online experiences? Have things happened to you online that have made you more circumspect in what you blog or otherwise write about?

Edit: By the way, I am way, way behind on responding to correspondence. I like correspondence. I appreciate it. I hope to do better with it. Please feel free to re-send if you did not get an answer.

Links are the currency of blogging. We're fortunate these days to receive a fair number of them, for which we're thankful. But once in a while, a link stands out, a link from another blogger who takes your story, and spins it into something of his own inspiration, something you'd never think to write, or something you simply couldn't write.

I was especially thankful, therefore, to receive a link this morning from Unwashed Advocate, in which the author riffs on my trifle about yet another overbroad law aimed at the Westboro Bigot Church, to tell the little-known history of William Calley after My Lai, the disgusting fashion in which high government officials pandered to Calley's fan club, and the author's meeting with one of the jurors at Calley's court martial: I give you Calley Revisited.

That day will come in two years and seven months, when Popehat reaches its (approximate) ten year anniversary.

Until that day, it will behoove us to congratulate friends who reach that milestone. One of them is our friend Mark Draughn, who blogs as Windypundit. In the dark days of 2002, all bloggers were named Something-Pundit, just as, some dark day in the future, all restaurants will be Taco Bell. But very few of the CatPundits,  DogPundits, FarmerPundits, PsychoPundits, SuperPundits, and WhatsyoursignimacapricornPundits survived and continued writing. Apart from Bill Quick and some hayseed in Tennessee, Mark is the last of a dying breed.

He's commemorating this auspicious anniversary by giving useful tips to aspiring bloggers.  I disagree with 21.6% of Mark's advice, but what do I know? I've only been doing this for seven years.

This site was founded in 2005.  Over those seven years, we have had occasional internal debates about advertising. The consensus we've reached is that Popehat will remain free of advertising until Popehat can no longer remain free of advertising.

That day is today.

As much as Ken loves you all, there are more of you than there used to be.  As furiously as I try to drive you all away, more readers keep coming, and the cost of running this site goes up. So advertising it will be.

In making this decision, we were guided by three considerations: 1) We need help to pay for the costs of running a site whose traffic has increased beyond anything we anticipated; 2) We want the means of acquiring that help to be as inoffensive and unobtrusive as possible; and 3) We want the site to remain a hobby, rather than a commercial endeavor.

We weighed various options in determining how to meet these goals. Initially, we had considered exchanging links and banner ads with pornographic websites, with payments to be directed to us on a per-click basis.  We haven't activated the feature for readers, but this is what it looks like to a site administrator:

Unfortunately Grandy, who runs our forum and much of this site behind the scenes, is a bit of a, well let's just say that we wanted a solution that made each of us comfortable.

We considered a slight modification of the site's content.  For instance, this is a list of draft posts that Ken was planning to publish later in the week:

• THANKS TO Vicks® NyQuil®, I CAN SNORT MY TAINT, AND GET A GOOD NIGHT'S SLEEP!
• THE QUAKER OATMEAL V. FUNNY-JUNK: PART LVII: CARREON'S OATMEAL GETS COOKED
• MOE'S BURRITOS, LARRY AND CURLY: REFLECTIONS ON LIFE AS A STOOGE GROUPIE
• DEBBIE SCHLUSSEL RIDES THE MY LITTLE PONY OF BIGOTRY
• JACK DANIELS, SHELL DEMONSTRATE THE BETTER ALTERNATIVE TO LEGAL THREATS

Ultimately we decided that this was taking things too far.

What we have decided to do is this.

We are putting up an Amazon link on the sidebar. If you purchase through Amazon, we would ask that you consider doing so through that link now and then. It will cost you nothing extra, but Amazon will remit some portion of its own profit to this site.

We have blogged for years, very occasionally, about products that we've enjoyed such as books. The frequency of such "product blogging" will not increase. But when we do it, we will include links to Amazon within the post.

What will we do with the money? It will go toward paying for the cost of running this site. By cost, we mean out-of-pocket expenses, bandwidth and hosting fees. Our salaries for running this site will remain zero.

Any proceeds from Amazon in excess of the costs of running this site will be donated to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-profit devoted to First Amendment legal advocacy and education.

If you have questions or comments, please fill out the little box below.

We get letters.

Greetings,

I don't know whether you read fanmail and questions. Probably not. I am not the kind that generally sends such things. All the same, I started visiting your blog just after the whole Carreon thing came into the picture. (I had also never read 'The Oatmeal' before a friend directed me to your site and an article about the brewing conflict)

Reading about the comments thread that your associate closed – and then subsequently reading through the comments that apparently warranted that – I came to wonder about what you consider the individual's role is in moderating speech on private (or at least privately owned) forums.

I am no legal expert, by any means or metric. I'm just a programmer/software engineer fascinated by the interface of a legal system rooted in tradition and the our brave new 'digital age'.

My question is; if an individual has no responsibility/culpability for the reactions to any stimuli you create, why do you even attempt to moderate the expression of those reactions?

Obviously, in that comment thread, we are talking about a long chain of stimulus/response. Someone posts an opinion, another posts an opinion about an opinion, someone posts an opinion about the opinion about another opinion, et cetera, et cetera.

But you (in the royal sense) seem to have an expectation that if people are going to engage in a dialog with or on Popehat, they must adhere to a certain level of… decorum. It seems like a schism to me; like "do as I say, not as I do". I understand full well that you are a private venue and nobody should be able to compel you to host speech you dislike.

Yet it nonetheless seems disingenuous to exercise such brute force control over a line of discourse while decrying other peoples expectations of – essentially – the same thing. We can say that Matthew Inman has every right to say or write or draw what pleases him, to get angry at a perceived injustice and to express that anger.

What cannot be supported is an assertion that Matthew Inman acted out with empathy or that Mr. Inman acted within the societal constraints of polite discourse and 'good taste'. As a response, measured against the responses in the thread you (again, in the sense of popehat.com) deemed unacceptable, it was far worse – both in content and intent.

So in the end, I am curious as to what value you see in the freedom of expression – for myself, it is the gateway into people's inner selves and the only mode to truly interact with that. If people can not say racist, sexist, derogatory or inflammatory things it does not mean that they do not think them – so it seems superior, again perhaps only to me, to have them feel like they may express these ideas. Then we can discuss them, follow back the lines of thinking until we discover some objective pathology and root it out. Suppression only drives the pathology deeper.

Thank you for any time you have taken to read my entirely non-legal question and critique.

Simply Signed,
Ben

Dear Ben,

Your kind email was forwarded to me. As it was I who chose to curtail others' freedom of expression, as you put it, allow me to answer your questions.

You and I proceed from different assumptions regarding the purpose, and nature, of this website. I will say at the outset that I appreciate your concession that Popehat is a private venue, and that as its proprietors we are under no obligation to host speech with which we disagree.

Unfortunately, the remainder of your letter undercuts that concession. You go on to speak of the freedom of expression, in terms very nearly implying that it is a right, and that it was somehow wrong for me to put an end to a comment thread that I had begun to find odious.

I view Popehat as property: my property, held in common with three friends. For me, the inquiry stops there.

I choose to invest my time into Popehat for one reason, and one reason alone. I enjoy what results from it. I believe that Popehat is a great website, and I gain personal satisfaction from knowing that I have done my part to make it so.

Let me be clear. I recognize that others also enjoy this site. It gladdens me no end when others praise the writing here, whether it is Ken's, or David's, or Grandy's, or my own. On days when the hits are coming, I am excited. When another blogger links to one of our pieces, I always read that link. I read comments from our audience with pleasure, even those with which I disagree. I am thankful that this site has readers; that many of those readers are thoughtful, informed, and witty; and that they choose to share in the labor I put into Popehat. I take pride in being master of what I believe to be a fine house. I enjoy having friends, and I consider many readers here friends though I've never met them and don't know their true names, over to visit at this fine house.

But if I were forced, by compulsion or out of assumed moral obligation, to allow others to use Popehat for purposes I find repellent, the joy that I gain from this site would turn to ashes in my mouth. I would no longer be the master of this house: I would become a slave, working for no reward.

Writing and maintaining this site is a lot of work, for all of us. None of us is paid in any coin except satisfaction. The instant Popehat becomes a drag, I'm gone.

So it is imperative, if this site is to survive, if our readers are to continue enjoying it with us, that we enjoy the site.

On Sunday night, I was most displeased to read comments of this sort:

OH shut up, Randy.

Just because you've been beaten down and trained to accept that you are WRONG simply because you are male doesn't mean that the rest of us have devolved into spineless pansies hoping for whatever the women of the word might deign to grace us with.

Some of us – and you most certainly are excluded – understand that while some women are so frail and delicate as to need to be protected from every-fucking-thing in life, most are actual adults, capable of coping with a world that does not caret to their every whim.

My girlfriend is a rape survivor. Anyone who suggests I don't have sympathy for women (or men) who have been sexually assaulted is a fucking fool. That does not mean, however, that I will stand by and let some jackass a) tell me that I – for all she knows – be her next rapist simply because I have a dick or b) stand here and listen to some otherjackass say to me – without any detectable sense of irony – that having some older dude say something perverted to her IS SEXUAL ASSAULT.

Because it fucking isn't, and if that event is all it took to break her little spirit, then it was to be broken eventually because at SOME point in her life mommy and daddy wasn't going to be there to comfort her when someone said she did poorly at something, or was less than completely supportive of whatever damned fool thought danced through her largely vacant skull.

You're a dishonest hack, and you might be the best living example of the concept of "Beta Male" that I have ever interacted with. You're almost a parody of the concept of the sniveling, groveling pansy who will do and say anything if he thinks it will make him seem sensitive enough to be allowed to gaze upon a womyn.

You're pathetic, you're worthless, and you should just shut your nommer lest you emasculate yourself further.

especially coming from a reader I consider one of those friends I've never met, but one I've had to warn in the past not to test my patience. I closed the thread, because it became painful for me to read it. I have not banned the reader from this site, because my anger had cooled by Monday morning.

But I wouldn't work on a website that makes me angry, unless I am being paid obscene amounts of money. Since that will never happen, I will not allow Popehat to make me angry.

If it's a choice between you and me, you will go. So that I can stay.

Incidentally, I found your comparison of my closing that thread to "brute force" a bit overwrought. When I think of "brute force", I envision pain, blood, and shattered teeth. Would you like to know what happens to a reader who crosses the invisible line? No bones are broken, I assure you. All that happens is that when that reader visits this site, he or she is greeted with this message:

You have been banned. You might have been banned because you are a spammer. You might have been banned because you're a troll of some sort. You might have been banned out of sheer malice. Perhaps you just caught one of us on a bad day. If you believe that you have been banned unjustly, drop us a line.

Rex non potest peccare!

That's not so bad, is it?

In closing Ben, I would like to thank you for your thoughtful mail. I hope that I have answered all questions to your satisfaction, and that you and I will enjoy Popehat together for many years to come.

Patrick

The ballsiest spammer I've ever encountered was an attorney who claimed that the desecration of Popehat with filler comments linking to his own site, a la:

Really enjoyed reading your blog post.  I will have to bookmark your site for later.

was the work of an incompetent marketing consultant, only to turn around and do it, or allow it to be done in his name, at other legal blogs.

After receiving what appeared to be a sincere apology for the initial comment spam, I graciously removed the blogpost calling Bradley Johnson out as a spammer from public view, only to see the same spam popping up at Crime and Federalism. When I informed Johnson's office that the promise not to spam again had been violated, and that the post was going back up, one of the arguments I got in return was essentially, "Well, we didn't do it at Popehat, so why do you care?"

(I care because I read Crime and Federalism, and I read its comments, you oily-haired, sharktoothed spammer.)

But that's amateurism. The Bradley Johnsons of the world kill their own parents, and beg mercy as orphans.

Enter realinsurance.com.au, which has a new wrinkle on the world's lamest excuse: "Yeah, sure, I killed my parents. Have mercy on me because I'm an orphan. But if you don't, I'm going to kill your parents too!"

Dear Marshall, Joshua:

It has come to our attention that a number of links exist on your domain which send traffic to our website realinsurance.com.au. As a result of warnings in Google Webmaster Tools we have determined that these links may be harmful either to the future marketing and reputation of realinsurance.com.au or our search results.

Accordingly, we request that you (A) remove all existing links to realinsurance.com.au from your domain, including, but not limited to the following URLs:

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/senators-consider-a-menu-of-options-including-medicare-expansion-as-public-option-alternative.php

(B) Cease creation of any additional links to realinsurance.com.au

(C) provide us with prompt notification once links to realinsurance.com.au have been removed either by return email, or using the link below. …

Poor Josh Marshall! Because Google is finally penalizing spammers like realinsurance.com.au, he has to spend his week digging through all the comments at his ten year old, wildly popular site, removing links left by realinsurance.com.au, and to provide proof that he's done so.

Or he would if he didn't have a ten year old, wildly popular site on which to mock them for their hubris.

It almost tempts one, almost, to begin leaving comments at random blogs, in the name of "Real Insurance", with the website address http://www.realinsurance.com.au, along the lines of:

What a magnificent blogpost this is on your fine internet site. I'll be sure to bookmark this site for later!

But don't do that. The ecosystem is polluted enough as it is.

Via Mark Bennett.

Patrick and I will be guest-blogging at Radley Balko's blog The Agitator starting next week. Radley is one of American journalism's most important and persuasive commentators on the excesses of police power (not to mention the related topic of Nanny-Statism), and Patrick and I are honored to hang out there for a while. Check it out, starting Monday.

We've been asked by Dr. Robert Newsome, the leading researcher of internet rage, to assist in his work chronicling the predicted double explosion coming from the Supreme Court's ruling on the consolidated Affordable Care Act cases, and the vote by the House of Representatives on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt.

And we're asking you to help.

Your mission is to help us find the most egregious example of hysterical, shrieking outrage, or smug, gloating condescension, produced on the World Wide Web today.

The contest opens today at 10:30 a.m., eastern time. It closes 24 hours later.

To make an entry, leave one link in comments. Multiple links may trigger our spam filter, even for veteran commenters. If you have multiple nominees, leave a comment for each.

The authors of this site will judge all links submitted. In general, more prominent websites and writers will be given more credit, but that doesn't mean that the archliberal or archconservative guy who frequents the "politics and other stuff" section of your gardening forum cannot win. More than prominence, we want bitching and whining. More than thoughtful analysis, we want predictions of DOOM for the American republic, or a holocaust for women, minorities, the poor, and children.

For this reason, entries from Andrew Sullivan, Paul Krugman, Debbie Schlussel, and Rush Limbaugh are automatically disqualified. That would be making it easy.

The prize for winning this contest will be a new DVD of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, shipped directly to you by Amazon, the deluxe edition if we can get it.

For this reason, you must leave a valid email address with your comment, i.e., not nobody@noneofyourbusiness.com. If you win, we will contact you for a shipping address.  You do not need to tell us your real name. We're perfectly happy shipping the dvd to, to pick an example of a pseudonymous commenter who lurks here, SPQR, but we have to know how to get in touch with SPQR.

No one with author privileges at Popehat is eligible for the prize, even past authors who haven't written here for four years, nor are their spouses and significant others.

Good luck, and happy hunting!

Update: The judges have spoken!

I've wanted to write a book for as long as I can remember. I made little books with construction paper and paste as a kid. I said I wanted to be a writer when I grew up if asked. I thought about the types of books I could write.

But I've never had what it takes to really do it. I've started a chapter or two here or there, but never persevered.

Part of it is being lazy. Part of it is being afraid. Part of it, at least for the last 14 years, is the cyclically appearing black dog, who sits and stares for a while before he clambers noisily to his feet and ambles away.

But other people do it. Other people have challenged themselves and set a goal and met it, and even have written about the process.

I've been telling myself that it would take too long, that I'm too busy, that I couldn't commit to meeting output goals.

But this morning it occurred to me that when you exclude quotes and hmtl stuff, I've written around 8,000-9,000 words on this site this week. The quality varied, and heaven above knows that I'd benefit from a patient editor. But I kind of liked the Bigfoot thing.

The average novel, I'm told, is around 70,000 – 100,000 words.

So how, exactly, is output volume an excuse I can fall back upon?

I'm under no illusions that writing something remotely publishable is as easy as writing one-off blog posts. I don't think that sustaining a coherent narrative is as easy as writing isolated snark that relies heavily on words like "twatwaffle."

But I've been dreaming about this my whole life. I tell my kids that they can do anything they want. Shouldn't I give it a real try?

So — I'm going to give it some thought. If I move forward, maybe I will write about the process occasionally. I've always thought that I'd like to write a legal caper novel — something in a style inspired by some odd combination of Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, and Dave Barry.

We'll see.

If you have experience with obtaining and enforcing restraining orders in Texas (more specifically, the Dallas area), especially in cases involving mental illness, and you’d be willing to answer a few questions, I’d be very grateful if you'd drop me an email.

This is not for a client, pro bono or otherwise, unfortunately.

Please do not speculate, here or elsewhere, about the parties involved in this matter. Doing so could cause me harm. Thank you.

Imagine the following:

1. Villain has acted badly towards Victim, in a way that has drawn much popular attention.
2. Villian's Spouse is not directly involved in the villainy.
3. However, someone posting under the name of Villain's Spouse has posted several hyperbolic, incendiary, Godwinizing and insulting statements in support of Villain and against Victim on the internet on stories about the villainy.
4. In the course of attempting to determine whether those comments are actually by Villain's Spouse, bloggers locate other content Spouse has authored on the web. It might be described as weird, counter-cultural, and (unsympathetically) rather nutty. It is arguable, though (based on review so far) not definite, that the style and language corroborates that Spouse is the one posting the incendiary comments referenced in 3.

So.

Is it mean, unworthy, and self-indulgent to blog about this, including what Spouse seems to be writing about the situation and the evidence (based on Spouse's other writings) that it is Spouse? Is it merely taking any shot that can be taken at Villain, through family? Should Spouse be cut a huge break because one defends one's Spouse when one's Spouse is attacked? Should a blogger refrain out of concern that by marshaling the evidence that the comments attributed to Spouse actually come from Spouse, the end result will be gratuitous mockery of Spouse's counter-cultural and quirky writings? Does it matter that Spouse's comments are Godwinizing against Victim and quite contemptible?

Note that I'm not asking whether writing about this would be legally permissible. That answer is clear. I'm asking whether you think it is right.

Speculation, accusation, hints, and jokes about who I'm talking about are unwelcome and will be taken as a personal affront.

The site is popping up and down today like crazy. It isn't traffic — we've had this level of traffic before.

This is just the latest example of this annoying pattern. We get transitory outages several times per week. It's rarely very long — often 5 minutes to half an hour — but it's tremendously annoying, and saps what little confidence I have in our host, Dreamhost.

So. I know I've asked before, but I'm asking again. Suggestions? Hostgator has been suggested by some. We've looked at Amazon but it looks a bit throw-you-in-the-deep-end.

People as bothered by asymmetry as I am will notice that our blogroll, on the left side of the page, has gotten a lot shorter.  This is something that should have been done a while ago.  The large majority of the blogs removed are no longer published, or their authors left a goodbye post, or all that's left is an error: 404 message.

One or two of the blogs taken off were removed for philosophical reasons. One or two were removed because they evidently have philosophical problems with us.

A couple of blogs that are long dead we keep around for sentimental reasons, principally the late great Jon Swift, and Dispatches from TJICistan, whose author may be released from prison with good behavior.

I'm struck by how difficult it seems to be, for many bloggers, to keep a site updated for more than a year.  I'm mildly encouraged that we're over seven years old.  A wise man once told me that year seven would be the most difficult year of my marriage. He was wrong. It was year eleven, but I take the point.  We're no longer running a "new" or "young" blog.  If you have a new or young blog, and you think our readers might enjoy what you have to write, drop us a line.  You may email me at patrick at this domain name.  You may email Ken at the same domain name, but bear in mind I'm more likely to add your site to the roll, and more likely to remove it.  It might be a good idea to look at our blogrolling policy, which is most liberal, before sending the email.

If you feel that your site was removed in error, let me know.

It's been over two months since we last explored what brings you hobbitses to this site. So it's time for Road to Popehat, the feature in which we review search logs to examine the hidden things, long forgotten in dark places, that bring new readers into the light spaces of Middle Earth.

This month brought out a number of people who are even geekier than we are.

Thief! Thief! Baggins!: It stole our precious, yessss it did, and when we catches it, we'll squeeze it!

O.J. didn't do it: That tricksy Baggins probably did it.

I have the right not to be offended: Then why are you coming here, praytell?

Cuckold say uncle: Cuckold need food, badly! Really, you've already cheated with his or her spouse. Do you have to twist the arm as well?

Please tell me that it is not likely that amendment one will pass in NC: We tried to warn you that it was likely to pass. Did you bother to bother to move to North Carolina so you could vote?

Crystal Cox batshit crazy: Do tell.

Koreans anal: Perhaps you should have typed 항문 instead?

How to avoid a probable cause affidavit in Colorado: I hear Utah's lovely this time of year.

Narcissistic disorder excluded from DSM: The original entry consisted of a photo of Ken, but a cease-and-desist letter took care of the problem.