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Warning: This site contains images and graphic descriptions of extreme violence and/or its effects. It's not as bad as it could be, but is meant to be shocking. Readers should be 18+ or a mature 17 or so. There is also some foul language occasionally, and potential for general upsetting of comforting conventional wisdom. Please view with discretion.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Tips for Commenting Here

January 1, 2012
last update October 17, 2015

Comment Policy (subject to change)
I invite comments here, and get plenty. I cannot personally respond to all of them anymore, but there are other commentators now to keep each other company. Please remain on or close to topic, and be civil (don't be fake, just don't be mean either), or I'll figure out how to block people and do it with anger.

I'd like to see more debate on here, if the world full of rebel supporters weren't so weak they can only address this information with silence and willful ignorance.

Spam Filter:
2015 late addition: I've found some comments, especially with links included, don't appear right away. Usually these wind up in my spam comments folder. As long as I'm actively watching (I'm trying to) I'll catch that, say it's not spam, and it'll appear. If it seems slow, try an alert comment, here or at the post. And if I'm watching close enough to see it ... if not, and if it's important enough, drop me an e-mail. caustic_logic at yahoo dot com.

"Comment As"
Some readers ready to contribute thoughts or questions will have a hard time navigating the comment functions. Nothing personal, but that's silly. Or easily-remedied anyway.

I discourage anonymous comments, but won't block anyone for that alone. Here's how you get your posting options:


Click "comment as" until you see the pop-out menu shown above. If you have a google/blogger account you want to use, sign in. Same for the next five options; if you don't know what they are, you probably don't have them. The rest of us can use the last two, preferably the one highlighted here. As soon as you click on it, you'll see this:
 You can type in any name you like. It can even change from one comment to the next, but I don't encourage that kind of confusing trickiness.  Using the URL window instead lets you have your ... hold on, let me do a test comment here and report back.

Back: You need to type a name, and it will be plain text if you leave the url window blank. If you put your website (no spam!) in that box, your screen name will be a link to that. See first two comments for an example of each.

HTML Tags for Links and Emphasis 
Providing links to great information is one of the most useful thing anyone here can do.Full URLs (web addresses) can be simply pasted into a comment, and people can re-copy it into a new window fine. However, HTML links make the it much easier and more useful, and I encourage it.

Making a URL link is a little tricky until you get it. In the following example, everything inside <angle brackets>is magic: "a" says it's a link, href= says "to this", the stuff inside the quotes is the link, copied right from the browser window in full, and "/a" says "end link." Betwen the bracket sets to open and close the link is the text (usually blue) that people will click on for the link. Try it, it's awesome.

Using text emphasis - bold and italics - in your comments is easy as heck. Again, magic <brackets> are used, opening and closing, with a simple letter, "b" or "i", effecting the words between. Here, it'll be extra clear you find that subject very important, but not quite very important.

29 comments:

  1. who the heck I am or claim to beJanuary 1, 2012 at 12:54 AM

    Test 1.

    ReplyDelete
  2. <a href="http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2011/12/second-battle-of-benghazi-really.html?showComment=1325454085592#c8069859314752475853..."/

    ReplyDelete
  3. a href=<"http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2011/12/second-battle-of-benghazi-really.html?showComment=1325454085592#c8069859314752475853>

    ReplyDelete
  4. Third try was a charm, with the closing link. Somehow it still didn't come out, but linking to specific comments is trickier than to a whole article. For that, you'd chop off the ? after html and everything after it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is how you do it:

    <a href=http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com>The Libyan Civil War: Critical Views</a>

    ...produces this:

    The Libyan Civil War: Critical Views

    By the way; this site now comes up fifth, after Wikipedia, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and CNN, for a Google search for "Libyan Civil War". Fourth, in fact, if you "include quotes".

    ReplyDelete
  6. How did you type that so it can be seen? Just the absent quote marks?

    Never mind.

    Fifth place, not bad. I chose well a vague site name, and thanks for the tip!

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Hurriya: A Valiant effort. If you're ready to try again, There are some dots at the end ... of the url that aren't right. You did the anonymous one right, except for the stuff inside the quotes somehow wasn't copied right. It usually end .html or something like that, sometimes with a bunch after it...

    It's all gibberish to me too, I just know a few simple tricks and then act all smart about it. :)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Sorry all, I'm not as involved as ideal in comments lately. Also, spotted a few comments marked as "spam," had to manually tell it "no, you're an idiot." It might be there's some reason a filter is tripped-urls, short comments, non-registered users, but it's just plain wrong anyway.

    They'll appear late now wherever they do. Delayed comments in the future might be the same problem. I'll try to keep a closer eye.

    Excellent stuff you're contributing lately, Hurriya. You can see submitting by e-mail is much less reliable than just putting it here yourself, where a decent number of viewers go.

    Cheerio

    ReplyDelete
  9. @CausticLogic - Re: people who "address this information with silence and willful ignorance". The political historian Edmund Burke once wrote: The only thing necessary for evil to succeed is that good men remain silent. Seems like there are a lot of "good" men around ...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Indeed, a lot of not-as-good-as-could-be, silent, good men and women. The Libyans among them, it's understandable. For everyone else, understandable in a way, but still slap-worthy.

      Cool site, Afrikat! Lies and war, it really is getting that bad if it wasn't already. Hitler is smiling in his grave.

      Delete
    2. The politics of fear plays a big part in the conspiracy of silence, especially the deafening media silence about the despicable torture and execution of Colonel Gaddafi, among other things. Where al-Jazeera is concerned, this politics of fear / conspiracy of silence seems to have commenced a few years ago when AJ's office in Kabul was deliberately bombed by the US. Then there was the deliberate targeting of journalists on the balcony of a room at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, fired upon by a US tank, killing a Ukranian cameraman and wounding others. But never mind, as we know at this blog, there will always be people who are prepared to stand up for truth and justice.

      Delete
  10. Slight glitch here. After posting above, the page semi-froze - i.e. unable to scroll up or down. I'll try again, this time not including an URL, to see what happens.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Re above: now works okay without URL included.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello Stan, nice to see that you have adopted a screen name. (In fact only the first of your three posts links to your site.)

      I have also experienced the effect where I am unable to scroll the page. The whole browser seems unresponsive. This is weird, as I am using Google Chrome under Linux.

      Delete
    2. Lame, your site is cool, made me almost feel bad I'd never seen it that I recall. Other than in a Google search, I presume - truth herz does ring a bell. Try again later, maybe it's a glitch. Otherwise, I can make a list of all regular contributors with preferred links there. FWIW.

      Delete
    3. Thanks for the compliment. Backlinks are always useful for optimising search results. I'll backlink to this blogspot site next time I update my own site, (which was banned from Google's search engine for about half a year, but it has since been restored following tedious correspondence).

      Delete
  12. Now having problem with Sirte Massacres: Gaddafi page. Semi-freezes -- can't scroll, can't post. If it's working okay on your side, please post this fairly important link on my behalf:
    http://rt.com/news/gaddafi-murder-trial-icc-145/

    Speaking of the (somewhat bloated) Sirte Massacres: Gaddafi page, don't you think there's now sufficient material, links etc, to put together a tentative narrative edit? If you like, I can do a draft and email it to you for consideration.

    The line I would take might go something like this: Mystery, contradiction and confusion surround the circumstances under which Colonel Gaddafi was captured, tortured and executed. Some say this blah blah blah, others say blah blah blah. Two main theories have emerged. One theory holds that the colonel died while "fleeing / escaping" from Sirte. The other theory, somewhat more convincing, is that he and his retinue were lured into an ambush while attempting the leave the country with the knowledge and pre-arranged consent of Nato. We may never know the truth of the matter. ICC and NTC dragging their heels, and even if or when a war-crime investigations is ever conducted, too much time will have passed for proper forensic analyis, identification of witness, independent post-mortem, etc.

    The above could be revised and updated if or when events unfold and/or more evidence becomes available. (Bearing in mind that, several decades after the event, people are still arguing about how and why JFK was assassinated, for one example among many).

    ReplyDelete
  13. Something strange going on with that Sirte: Gaddafi page. I'm now able to access it, but IE warning comes up: "A script on this page is causing IE to run slowly. Do you want to disable the script?" Click "Yes" and the page becomes okay. Hmmmmm. Not happening with other pages, just the Sirte: Gaddafi page.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Let's see if this newbie can get it right: Testing, testing, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  15. There is a bug in the "RECENT COMMENTS" widget on the right side. The links do not lead to the individual comments directly, but to the start of the article. There is an extra "comment-" in the URL after the hash (#) sign.

    If you manually remove the extra characters from the URL you will reach the comment.

    Example:
    http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2012/03/khamis-brigade-shed-massacre-unhrc.html?showComment=1331247992412#comment-c5697201935961737266

    Corrected URL:
    http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2012/03/khamis-brigade-shed-massacre-unhrc.html?showComment=1331247992412#c5697201935961737266

    ReplyDelete

Comments welcome. Stay civil and on or near-topic. If you're at all stumped about how to comment, please see this post.