The General is an evil genius. (h/t Warren Terra)
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Also, since DougJ’s latest flash of brilliance has spawned a new burst of nymic creativity, an update on some WordPress quirks:
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— All new nyms (and new IP addresses, and new platforms) are sent directly to moderation, for fear of spammers. Please don’t take it personally. You will be released from moderation when one of the front-pagers gets around to going “backstage” and running through the Pending file comment by comment. Remember, this is a volunteer enterprise for all of us, and you know what they say about volunteers…
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— More than two three hyperlinks will trip the moderation filter. The “Reply” function is a hyperlink, so if you are ‘replying’ to another poster, you can only attach one two YouTube or other pertinent links per comment. There’s always the option of using multiple comments, if we really need to hear all your earworms.
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— Type two underscores (‘uppercase dashes’) between each paragraph in your blockquote to keep your entire quote “in the box”. Two underscores in a “blank” line before the blockquote (after the “reply” line) will keep the whole quote from coming out in Bold font. The underscores won’t be visible in your comment when it appears.
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— The spam filter doesn’t like the words socialist, socialism, or specialist because they contain the spam-friendly word cialis. The spam filter doesn’t like words like casino or poker or roulette for the same reason. Yes, Rahm agrees that the WP spam filter is retarded not to know better.
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— No ‘unattached’ hyphens, please! Use two hyphens – – like this — for parentheticals, or just-one-no-space between con-joined words. You don’t need a hyphen before adding your name (nym) at the bottom of your comment, because your nym appears in big bold letters at the top of your comment automatically. WP reads dangling dashes as instructions to strikethru all following words, not just in your comment but in every comment after yours. And on some platforms (IE) that same dangling hyphen will prevent everybody else from commenting entirely, so they can’t even let us know what’s gone wrong.
Mike G
Daniel Gross eviscerates the Bush tax cuts with a rusty chainsaw —
http://www.slate.com/id/2267681/
“Keep this in mind: The people who designed the current, unsustainable tax system promised us that lower marginal rates, and lower taxes on capital and dividends, would boost the economy, promote investment, create jobs, spur market performance, and raise everybody’s income. They were wrong. (It’s no coincidence that these same people also warned us that raising taxes in 1993 would kill market returns and the economy. They were wrong then, too. They’re pretty much always wrong.) “
Yutsano
Fixed for accuracy. At least that’s the maximum number I’ve gotten away with.
Mark S.
@Mike G:
Do you miss him yet?
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Ditto this. And, two links if you are ‘replying to’ someone. Other than that, FYWPWAVRPFISJFY!
@Mark S.: Fuck NO!
Warren Terra
Thanks for the h/t – but I do feel the need to point out that the pseud is Warren Terra.
MeDrewNotYou
My parents liked all the friendly remarks Danny got the other day. I guess they’re really happy they aren’t the only ones that think he’s cute. My sister, however, is pissed at him because he snarled at her when she grabbed a blanket he was half sitting on and awoke/startled him. I’ve seen him grumpy before, and believe me, it isn’t nearly as cute.
I’ll also take this opportunity to get myself un-pre-modded. C’mon you lazy volunteers! Earn your thanklessness!
asiangrrlMN
@MeDrewNotYou: Danny is too dang cute, especially with Little D right by him. And, your sister got exactly what she deserved trying to take HIS blanket!
Yutsano
@MeDrewNotYou: Haz me own puppeh story. I was riding into work this morning and there was a guy with a dog on there. I instantly think service dog and sit close because I love watching them work. Turns out I was mostly right. Puppeh will grow up one day to be a service dog, but he’s still in training and was on his first bus ride evah. He didn’t do too bad but still was subject to reacting to inappropriate stimuli (which for a 15 month old puppy he was doing all right there) and had a couple of “Save me Daddy!!” whines. I still got a couple of kisses out of the deal.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Aaaaaw! So sweet. I’ve never seen a service puppy in training!
Oh, and this seems highly-appropriate: FYWP for not letting me edit my previous comment to add this one.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Oh I forgot a detail: he was half husky and half Lab. He had the sweetest face, most of the Lab style fur (except for an attractive shoulder ruff) and one bright blue and one deep brown eye. I would have taken him just as he was he was so adorable and sweet.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Awwwww! That makes me melt. If you see him again, take a photo with your cell.
MeDrewNotYou
@Yutsano: His first bus ride! He’s becoming a little man!
Mike G
@Mark S.:
The only guy to miss Bush is that Iraqi who threw his shoes at him.
MeDrewNotYou
@asiangrrlMN: Danny hasn’t had a bath in a while, so I imagine she paid for taking it. Besides, I can relate to being in a bad mood when woken up.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: I was half-tempted to take one right then, but since poor puppeh was on his first big trip I was afraid it would be too disruptive. I probably wasn’t alone in wanting one either, he may habe been still learning the service dog ropes but he was for sure laying on the puppeh charm thick.
@MeDrewNotYou:He seems destined to be a big’un too. I’d guess he was around 60 pounds and he was only 15 months. He might not get any taller but he will definitely fill out some. Oh and the handler had his favorite toy and a blankie for when they got back to the office.
Villago Delenda Est
I understand the unfortunate necessity of anti-spam measures that restrict legitimate contributors to this site.
The guys who invented this thing (Al Gore, Vint Cerf, you know, those guys) didn’t anticipate that undisciplined greedy idiots would eventually ruin it for everyone. So, once again, technical means are being used to address what is essentially a social (or more to the point, an anti-social) phenomenon.
asiangrrlMN
@MeDrewNotYou: Yep. Me, too. I was snoozing on the couch the other day/night (don’t remember which), and I dreamed that something was trying to suffocate me and pin me down. I started flailing, woke myself up, and I realized it was one of my cats kneading/walking on me as slept. I felt horrible because I accidentally hit him, but he was OK.
@Yutsano: Awwwww! Like I said, next time.
@Villago Delenda Est: Free market, bitchez! Why iz teh spam-moderator oppressing the working stiffs?
Steeplejack
@asiangrrlMN:
Okay, I was with you until “ISJFY.” Wha?
asiangrrlMN
@Steeplejack: What? You mean “I Seasoned Just For You” is not a common acronym?
ETA: Or, “I Sharpened Just For You”, depending on when you ask.
Steeplejack
@asiangrrlMN:
Me likey.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Definitely.
And just because I never get tired of them and I’m in that kind of mood, I give you a modern day Hachiko, but with a much happier ending. I also want to know if anyone else gets a “ping” off this guy or if it’s just me.
Tattoosydney
@Yutsano:
Are we still talking about the dog?
Yutsano
@Tattoosydney: At 15 months? Uhh, yeah. I’ll go a bit younger but I do stick to at least age of consent here.
Tattoosydney
@Yutsano:
… the Merciless?
Tattoosydney
@Yutsano:
I edited that bit out so it doesn’t count.
Yutsano
@Tattoosydney: Hee. Sure.
Yutsano
@Tattoosydney: In that case I defer to answer # 25.
Yutsano
There is a not-so-subtle hint in this comment.
mclaren
Your webmaster can’t write a simple script to go through every post and check for a single dangling hyphen at the end?
Really?
This is 2010. Unbelievable.
Kat
It could be straight out of Disney hit The Lion King but this lion cub and meerkat best-friendship is real.
Meet the real-life Simba and Timon.
Awwwwh… Aren’t they sweet?
Odie Hugh Manatee
A guitar repair forum I hang at had an ignorant shit from Texas post this in a discussion about guitar tool repair costs:
What a dumbfucker.
Catsy
Or, you know, you could use a comment editor that is not filled with such an enormous volume of
shitty codecreative design that you need a manual in order towork aroundappreciate all of itsinexcusable bugsfeatures.I hear that simple HTML forms with text boxes worked quite well in the antediluvian days of yore.
Catsy
In seriousness, this has been going on for years now. And it just blows my mind that in that span of time, none of the people who are actually responsible for maintaining any of the relevant code have managed any of the following relatively simple things:
1. Adjusting the behavior of the spam filter so that it traps pattern “foo” but not legitimate words which have “foo” as a substring, such as “food” or “fool”.
2. Fixing the retarded parsing engine in the editor so that it doesn’t interpret a newline as the end of a blockquote or any other tag that routinely contains multi-line data
3. Adding logic to the parser that closes all open tags–at the very least, tags that the parser itself added
The WP editor does not add value to the experience here. It is an incompetently-designed piece of crap that is so shitty you are better off using raw HTML forms. It is a running joke that has long since ceased to be funny.
Edit: FYWP. Add creative interpretation of where I actually intended to put a new line to its list of design atrocities.
El Cid
@Mike G: In fairness, they’re not so much ‘wrong’ as they are mean, callous, greedy liars. ‘Wrong’ would be a compliment.
kommrade reproductive vigor
So basically, we shouldn’t try to post comments. Got it.
El Cid
@Odie Hugh Manatee: What, have you not seen all the panhandlers out on the corners offering to replace truss rods for food? All those young pickup swappers buying T-bone steaks?
Cat Lady
I’m now in week three of not being able to access the site with my home ISP, and have resorted to proxy servers which let me comment but not reply (FYWP!). Seeing that BJ has become the straw through which I observe teh crazee, I need this site to fucking work. Help a sista out. kthxbai.
Alwhite
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
As I have been saying for some time now: there will be plenty of jobs in the US once we agree to work for the wages they earn in China or India or Thailand. The problem they have yet to work out is who will be buying this $200 sneakers, $500 IpPads, $2000 wide-screens etc. But I’m sure the geniuses that rule our world will figure that out.
QUESTION, how do you get cross through to stop? If I try to
strike just one word it does them all. Like thisRSA
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Let’s see…
Edit: Hey, cool. Thanks, WP, for coming up with weird defaults and unintuitive alternatives to basic HTML.
Jay C
Well, since I’m using the same old handle, no prob there:
No: still in bold. WTH?
No, Anne: what DO they say…. ?
Odie Hugh Manatee
@El Cid:
Nope. Must mean that they’re all on welfare! They were probably going to steal the truss rods and fake putting them in.
@Alwhite:
Hell, at least they would have jobs and a little money. Ok, very little money, but at least they would have jobs!
I saw a post over at Wonkette about how a WalMart exec was lamenting that their customers are increasingly buying things through government subsidies and that they will have to find a way to succeed during these tough economic times. As a Wonketeer said, Fuck you WalMart. You screw employees over by paying them little with poor or no benefits, lowering the standards for everyone else, and then you wonder why people don’t have any money to spend at your store?!
Fuck you.
TooManyJens
May I suggest Akismet for spam control rather than the keyword filter?
Also, ckeditor is available as a WordPress plugin. I’ve been using it as a WYSIWYG editor for Drupal, and it’s nifty. Generates such clean HTML, it’ll make you weep.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Awwwww! Sooooo sweet. Poor ears, though. Sigh.
And, you and FH#1–get a room already!
@Steeplejack: Me, too! However, I throw up whatever acronym is on my mind at the time. I think I may keep this one.
@Kat: Awwwwwww! Sweeeeeet story.
Ross Hershberger
Why does WP hate our freedoms, and our way of life?
Seriously, the individual responsible for that drastically illogical piece of coding should…. hit himself in the face, or something. Bad code. Very very bad code.
Steeplejack
@Jay C:
Don’t leave a blank line between your blockquote and the last line of “regular” text above it. FYWP will put in the blank line and will graciously not make your quote bold.
Here is my canonical blockquote snippet:
(h/t Monkeyboy © 2009)
REN
@yutsano
Had a dog that was half husky and half lab. She suffered from seizures her whole life, the vet assured us that she wouldn’t see 7, so of course she lived to be 16. She looked just like a lab except for a bushy tail and enough husky fur to keep her warm at the North Pole. Pure black however.
I’ve got a picture around here somewhere of her sitting on the last 2 sq. foot of ice left from the giant snowbanks we get in our yard. After deer hunting season she loved to go in the woods and eat gut piles, come home with her stomach dragging and then puke it up in the house. She always came in to puke.
She was the most bull-headed creature I’ve ever known but I loved her anyway, and miss her.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
Let’s call a spade a spade. The spam filter is a piece of crap that any high school programming class could do better.
The Tim Channel
My contribution to the fiasco that is Christine O’Donnell is posted for your consideration:
Excerpt:
Full: http://thetimchannel.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/the-forty-year-old-virginesse/
Enjoy.
monkeyboy
I stumbled across the “double underscore hack” in the comment thread to this 2009/10/18 posting: Sunday Night Open Thread (Secret Blockquote Fix!), and later decided that it was so stupid and unobvious that it should be patented, but I just settled for copyrighting it.
So remember juicers, the two underscores you use to separate paragraphs in the edit box are © 2009 Monkeyboy. Note that I hold no copyright claim on how your posting actually appears in the thread because the underscores are removed.
Anyway, my ISP has recently changed my IP address (without telling me or why) so I need to be re certified as a mature responsible person. (HA!)
P.S. just kidding about the ©, but would doing so be technically legal?