Don’t panic. They will be gone soon.
It happened on this wise. My comments hosting company is Disqus, and they recently decided that if you did not subscribe to a paying account, they would put ads up on the formerly free accounts. As much as I value and esteem the comments made here, I did not want to pay what they were going to charge in order to arrange those comments to make them look pretty.
Complicating things further, Disqus also joined the totalitolerance bridge by reserving to themselves the right to moderate comments here, expunging some commenters who failed to believe that we have always been at war with Eastasia.
So we will be switching comment hosts, and I hope it will all happen soon. I am currently on the road, so coordinating this might take a tad longer. So try to put up with Ellen DeGeneres kissing the click bait.
“We have always been at war with eastasia.” (?)
I may have to check with Disqus,
The Ministry of peace, and
The Ministry of love on that one!
????
That Eurasia to Eastasia mid-sentence swap in 1984 that nobody (except Winston) noticed might be the scariest thing I have ever read.
If they were smart, they would just blame Antarctica!
Plus, why are penguins always overdressed?
????
I like you, “A” dad, but I got to be honest — I don’t get most of what you say.
In the novel 1984, there were 3 powers, Oceana, Eurasia and Eastasia.
Yet a whole other continent was not mentioned. Antarctica, a frozen land, populated only by penguins.
The 3 powers could have just said they were all at war with Antarctica, and then not fought at all. ????
Since Antarctic penguins look like they are wearing tuxedos, they are always “overdressed”.
I do have an odd sense of humor!????
Commies, Commies everywhere…
Travel safe, Pastor Doug :)
In the meanwhile, and on the user side, AdBlock Plus will probably do the trick. I use that as a Chrome plugin and have not seen any ads.
Same story here, Firefox.
I use ABP which tells me it is currently blocking 23 ads. I checked in on my iPad though and it was all !!!!!!!!!!!!!SHOCK AMAZE WITH THIS $4 DIET PILL!!!!!!!!
I got 25 CAT PICTURES TO MAKE YOU SMILE. Because I couldn’t resist going there, I’m sure there will be plenty more.
Ad Muncher is another good blocker.
I see no adds, but I have blockers everywhere.
I have been following the disqus convergence debate however, and I’m rather disappointed that they have taken it upon themselves to edit for content.
Same here. You can see it if you open this page in chrome’s incognito mode. In any case, screw disqus and their Nazi-Germany censorship.
I wish I had a positive recommendation to replace Disqus, although I’ve come to the conclusion that almost anything would be an improvement. To whoever is working on a replacement, please, please, please consider something with basic text formatting capabilities. Having to enter markup and and markup just to get quotes, bold and italics, is degrading. Please also continue supporting nested comments to that we can respond efficiently to particular users here. It would be nice to maintain Disqus on the older posts, so as not to obliterate the comment history entirely. Even better would be to export the comment… Read more »
And get something editable! One blog I participate on frequently has no edit capability and it’s maddening. Not that I’d expect them to move backward in that direction, but it’s such an important consideration I had to mention it.
And no Facebook-based comment system, PLEASE!!!
I think most of the comments here are written in the Book of Life. ???? It’s just that we have no editorial access!????
Terrifying thought….
While I might be guilty of some bad jokes, just about everything else is written with the understanding that Heaven is keeping it on record!
; – )
I hope not 40 ACRES’ though. And most of Krychek_2 and RandMan, ugh, better stop.
If we don’t have the right advocate before God, we will have to give account for every careless word. ????
I don’t like nested comments, but if we have them, Facebook’s policy on one nested only keeps them manageable.
Edit is more important than markup for me.
Nesting can become extreme, but it should be easy to have threads be collapsed, by default, below a certain depth.
A complete lack of any threading would make responses to comments really hard to follow.
While we are dreaming, there’s no huge technical reason not to have a switch to present an unthreaded, flat list of posts in the order they arrived.
I agree that an editing capability is really important.
We need the Wovax folks or somebody like that to write a comment system and sell it for a reasonable price.
Given the evidence, I think that a scalable, well-featured comment system is beyond the most complex and advanced technical achievements of mankind; the sort of thing that only pops up once in a millennia, is ignored by industry, and quickly replaced by various over-hyped and inadequate imitations.
Well…aren’t we cheery this evening.
I was being sarcastic. I actually wouldn’t want to discourage Wovax from such a project. I’ll work on my attitude adjustment. :-)
As a computer programmer, I think designing and creating a “scalable, well-featured comment system” is likely very difficult. I’ve thought about the design of comment systems and it is more complicated than one might think at first glance. Then there is the issue of coding, marketing, and, of course, getting sites and people to accept that different is not as terrible as they might think. Since I’m on the general topic, I am wondering if the paragraph tag works in Disqus. If this line is on a new line, it does.
I have adblock, so I didn’t notice. :)
It drove me to install the Adblock browser on my phone. Unfortunately, that’s rather buggy.
Try Brave for you browser.
It has built in capability to block ads, tracking and scripts separately, and works pretty well on mobile devices.
Brave is great, but if you want something that’ll work with Safari/safari-view in apps, you might want a dedicated ad-blocking app. Loads are available, but 1Blocker is my favourite.
Might there just be some Christian computer egghead out there who would create an ad free system (or manageable good ads) for folks who really don’t care about the most daring dresses worn at the latest awards show?
Opera browser is blocking them all, I think. I don’t see any, anyway.
http://www.opera.com/
To Whom It May Apply,
The word you are looking for is “ads,” as it is the abbreviation for advertisements. We are not really after a program that blocks all “adds,” since that would, in fact, block all ability to proliferate our mounting quantity of replies.
Unless, of course, that is what you’re actually trying to achieve. Might be a useful tool, in retrospect. Some of us, come to think, might also find useful a program that blocks all “subtracts,” but I digress…
Some alternatives:
https://posativ.org/isso/
https://vanillaforums.com/en/software/
If you need help integrating something new, please feel free to reach out in a DM: twitter.com/timothylong
These might also be worth looking at:
https://www.commentics.org/
https://www.discourse.org/
Forgive me if I’m a little slow on the uptake, but what kinds of comments would Disqus be deleting from this blog? (The whole 1984 thing went right over my head … )
I wondered that as well. Disqus handles the comments on Breitbart. If Disqus plans to go after opinions it finds abhorrent, it will be too busy deleting comments over there to have time for anything else.
Moderating individual comments is only one possibility. The other obvious one is that Disqus might moderate at the user account level, possibly excluding people from ever visiting this blog in the first place. Wilson’s point seems to be that he would rather have the tools to be able to moderate using his own criteria, rather than the unknown filters used by Disqus.
circa 1984…. the book not the movie… or sure at least watch the movie :)
I havent weighed in on the ads much and I dont know that the proprietor reads all of these comments and I wouldnt expect him to. But I just wanted to say that I like disqus in part because it is also used by the Federalist (which also has ads) and that liberal rag, the Atlantic (which is apparently paying the extortionary fees), both of which I read. One log-in for all three works for me. My vote is to stick with disqus for the time being. Plus the ads help me keep up with Ellen. Its just like the… Read more »