Saturday, February 7, 2009

Site News

A few quick notes about the site. First off, I've added a few new labels for my articles. The most prominent are Historic Imagery and Book Reviews. The first will be attached to any post incorporating Google Earth's historical imagery, and the second will be attached to...well, ok, that one should be self explanatory! Secondly, I'm considering either incorporating the comment moderation feature, whereby I will have to manually approve comments to my articles, or disabling comments altogether, relying on the forum and e-mail correspondance for feedback and inquiries. This is due to the increasing number of idiot spammers who are starting to creep into the comments, advertising all manner of things which have absolutely nothing to do with the content of the articles published here. The problem with the first method is that only users with Google accounts of some sort (blogger, gmail, etc) will be able to comment. The problem with the second method is that people will have to join the forum or send an e-mail should they wish to comment on something. What do the readers think? I haven't decided to respond in either fashion just yet, but I thought I should let you all know what I'm thinking and why.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This step is a must to weed out spammers.
You could allow only registered persons to comment.
Getting a fake email ID is not difficult at all.
Plz do it at the earliest.

Anonymous said...

You should disable the comment function on the blog posts. Any comment should be done in an appropriate thread on the forum

Anonymous said...

I also think you should disable comments. Anyone wishing to comment should post it in the forum in thread specifically created for each article.

NotRichard said...

Comments left directly on the post in question form a better part of the historical record and should be left - with moderation.

If I google "Chinese air defense network imagery" (for instance) and arrive at your page, I won't know there is an "attached" forum or thread and so may miss important/useful discussion of the post.

Sean O'Connor said...

Anyone should be able to find the forum, it is either linked to at the end of the articles or it is available as a link to the right of the screen.

There are some older posts that do not have a link to the forum as it didn't exist back then, so perhaps a solution there is for me to go back and insert a forum link into those articles?

At any rate I'm still thinking this one over, thanks to everyone for their inputs.