UPDATE: Now there has been a second mass shooting in less than 24 hours, In Dayton Ohio, leaving nine dead. Shooter was wearing body armor.
Another mass shooter, this time in and around a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Reliable information is hard to come by at this early stage but we know that the shooting suspect is in custody and that there have been 20 fatalities.
The shooter left behind a manifesto, posted shortly before the shooting on 8chan. He said he was inspired by the Christchurch shooter, and declared that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Post your thoughts and any reliable information you have in the thread below. No trolls.
UPDATE: Updated with # of fatalities and a few changes in wording about the manifesto allegedly written by the shooter.
UPDATE 2: Updated with news of the Dayton shooting and to make clear that the el paso manifesto has been definitively tied to the alleged shooter.
The “Playboy for the articles” of the 21st century?
Where the hell is the comment I just made?
Repost
The “Playboy for the articles” of the 21st century?
So it didn’t appear, the one I posted after it did, the repost didn’t … are comments being filtered by keywords or something? This is looking an awful lot like censorship. And yeah, after the above appeared I flipped back to page 3 to make sure my previous one wasn’t between the Katamount comment and this one. It isn’t there. The Katamount one is the last one on page 3 and my second comment is the first one on page 4, with my first comment still missing.
Can comments not just be delayed but appear out of sequence other than by some having been held for moderation?
And am I being singled out, or are other people’s comments being held while later comments by the same person go straight through as well?
@Katamount
Slightly worried about what they’ll come up with now. See my comment on the more recent post about the Dayton shooting for more information. I’m a metal fan, and I’m a little worried metal will be the next thing to be blamed for shootings. I completely condemn this shooter and I (and most metal fans) hate pornogrind for a myriad of reasons, but I’m still expecting conservatives to again scapegoat metal.
Looks like anything else I post is being held now. Or just blackholed. 🙁
I guess I’ve finally managed to overstay my welcome here. The surprising thing really is that it didn’t happen sooner. I’ve always been the fifth wheel, somehow, in any and every social environment … just usually people figure it out and exclude me faster than they did here.
The weirdest thing is it shows two new comments from me in the comment sidebar, but there’s only the one that ever showed up. The other one oddly links to the Katamount post immediately preceding mine. I guess deleting people’s comments screws up the indexing or something?
I don’t suppose anyone else will see this except maybe David anyway. But if this is the end, please at least post something indicating why? I can’t figure out what I did. In fact it was my first comment in a while, wasn’t it? I didn’t even expect it to be controversial let alone get this swift and severe a reaction …
@Surplus
We can see all 5 of your comments. Try refreshing the page. It is not the end.
omg surplus, YOU KNOW the comments are buggy, we have been TELLING YOU THIS for like A YEAR.
Also, sometimes the spam filter EATS COMMENTS. An email to David will get them let through, if that’s the problem.
I am not telling you how to get your comments to display again. I’ve had it with this.
Surplus
Really again. I can see all five of your comments. Refresh the fucking page and then open the article by clicking on it. Not by pressing the comments on the side bar. If I have to explain this to you one more time I’m writting you off as someone to reply to because this is getting ridiculous. Also stop throwing yourself a fucking pity party in a thread about to mass shootings!
Moggie,
The other day, I changed my Twitter name to “Drag Queen Advocate” in him or of her.
I don’t really know what one is, but it seems awesome and I’ve always like drag, so it fits.
The comments are buggy, yes, but on every previous occasion if I made a second comment and the second comment went through, the first one went through too. Some sort of broken-logjam effect.
This time I posted a comment, it didn’t appear, I posted a second comment, the second comment did appear on a new page by itself, and I fully expected the logjam effect again. So I clicked the “3” at the bottom to go back to the previous page and confirm that the first comment was also there, but before the page split …
And it wasn’t. Page 3 at that time ended with a comment by Katamount, while page 4 started with my second comment, and my first was not anywhere on page 3 or page 4.
That had never happened before, for a comment on a thread to appear while an earlier comment on the same thread remained in limbo still.
I now see the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th comments but not the first — page 4 for me still starts with the 2nd comment. So unless the buggy comment system retroactively added comments to page 3 after it had already spawned page 4 (an impossibility, surely? Wouldn’t it at least have pushed the Katamount comment at the bottom of page 3 over the line and onto the top of page 4? That has not happened) then my first one is still missing.
I’m now unsure what the heck is happening. But I think the comment bugs are getting worse. It keeps doing things it hadn’t done before. Remember, a year or so ago we didn’t have any problems with comment posting. Then it became common for comments to appear at first only on the thread they were posted on, but not appear in the “recent comments” sidebar on any other thread than their own for a while, but the problem was confined to the “recent comments” sidebar. And then comments started to sometimes not show up promptly on their own threads, or in “recent comments” on any thread, as well. And then, only a month or so ago, it started to be possible for a comment to appear only as a listing in “recent comments” and be inaccessible to actually read it for a while, before the comment itself was published. And now, apparently, it’s possible for a later comment to the same thread to appear while an earlier one remains in limbo, which had never happened before today.
And in all of this time I see no evidence that any effort whatsoever has been made to hunt down the bug and fix it. Instead, changes of some sort (version updates of some of the site’s software?) keep ratcheting it up to being gradually worse and worse (not only with new unprecedented buggy behaviors being added to the repertoire of wonkiness every couple of months, but with the existing ones becoming more frequent) and nobody, including the site’s admin, seems inclined to even investigate why this is happening, let alone how it can be fixed to restore correct behavior (defined as, say, the behavior the commenting system had in 2017).
Is there any official word on why the system seems to keep growing new bugs on a monthly basis, or why nothing seems to be done about fixing the bugs?
And if there’s a better place to post questions or inquiries like this, other than “in the context/thread where the issue first arose”, where would that be? I’d be happy to post this there instead, as long as it will get attention there rather than be swept under the rug and ignored until yet another new malfunction develops.
Oh Jesus.
I did not read whatever it is you posted, Surplus, because you’ve been whinging about this for so long now I really don’t care.
Obviously this is important to you, but equally obviously you are *annoying everyone* with your posts about how the comments are out to get you.
You honestly have two choices here, next time you have this problem.
A) Pay for David to hire someone to fix the comments system, or
B) Don’t tell us how your comment didn’t go through, so obviously you’re shadowbanned, and isn’t that always the way? The world is out to get you!
WE.
KNOW.
Next time you feel like telling us, don’t. Just, don’t.
I think I’m just going to start posting annoyed animals in response to your posts about this.
(Feel free to talk about other things! Just not this thing.)
Not impossible at all, and we frequently see this behavior when a post gets let through moderation. Hell, if I notice a post that was previously on page 1 is now on page 2, I will click back to page 1 to see what the comment I missed was in case it’s a new commenter to welcome or a troll. That’s just how pagination works on websites. Frankly, it would be the absolute worst practice ever (in addition to being more difficult) to tie a specific comment to a specific page, especially on a platform like wordpress with configurable options for how many posts appear in a page.
You’re being ridiculous and whiny about nothing and exceedingly demanding of David, who so graciously provides this space and its content for free.
@Moggie
I almost wish those guys got murdered themselves. Because being gay or trans is not a choice, fathers can be abusive scum, the police are racist scum, I could go on.
@Surplus
I consider Saints Row 2 to be the best game mechanically based on the amount of features it has without mods. But I can concede that Grand Theft Auto gameplay can get boring, since it’s primarily driving and shooting.
@Naglfar
I fear that too.
@rv97 – Mind the comments policy.
Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-California), while on Fox News: “There are no mass shootings in Japan because there are no video games there.”
Wut.
@Allandrel, this thread suggests he didn’t say that.
@Moggie
God, I hope so. I don’t think I can deal with that level of “2 + 2 = 5.”
@Surplus:
Clearly, Doug Ford is bribing David to make sure posting comments here is mildly inconvenient for you.
Seriously, give it a rest. A very, very long one.
@Surplus
Your first post is, in fact, on page 3.
I believe that you could save yourself a lot of effort and consternation if, instead of immediately assuming that something is impossible and designed to harm you specifically, you make a minimal effort to, you know, check the thing.
My first though was like, “You can play as a car mechanic in GTA?”
I just spent hours on Twitter, trawling this topic to see some Princess Mononoke references. (Eventually found one.)
Whoa. Here’s a Miyazaki reference I didn’t expect, but should have:
https://twitter.com/bealestreetpoet/status/1158503648848220160
Surplus, there’s no plot and you haven’t been banned; the comments are just buggy.
I suspect it may be because the comments are so active and that there are so many of them altogether (roughly 760,000 total since I switched to wordpress). I haven’t fixed the comments because I have no technical ability and I can’t really afford to pay someone to fix it, though I guess I will look into that. There are other things about the site that need fixing too.
The only keywords I filter are a number of slurs; sometimes people get comments held for using “retard” or “retardation” when they’re not using the word as a slur.
I don’t know what happened to your posts this time but it appears they all went through. The spam and trash fiters sometimes eat comments for no good reason but that didn’t happen with your comments this time.
Also, if something goes wrong with a comment — and this goes for everyone — please email me about it. Looking through the trash folder just now I found a bunch of comments by Naglfar that got eaten, so I let them through. Sorry, Naglfar!
@David
I didn’t notice any comments getting eaten, so that’s strange. Did I say anything in violation of the policy?
Naglfar, no, the comments were all fine.
Just to let everyone know, I have taken your advice about non-appearing comments on board. Usually, I just have to wait for a comment to appear (maybe 20% of comments) but they almost always do appear eventually.
The *very* few times they don’t, my problem is always that I’ve somehow messed up or just changed* my handle and those comments appear a bit later, when David has let them through.
*I don’t really do this anymore, because I tend to forget what changes I’ve made! :s
When I’ve had comments vanish, I’ve done that thing of manually changing the number at the end of the URL and re-loading; and then they come back.
Off topic but kind of frustrating:
I was visiting my parents and it appears that my mother has become a full blown SWERF since I last saw them. She sees a presentation about child sex trafficking, then decides that all sex workers are trafficking victims, so when I argue that many aren’t and that if sex work was legal there would be less trafficking, she declares that they all actually are because she conflates sex work and child sex trafficking. I asked about whether a woman should be allowed to be a stripper if she wants to of her own free will, and she responded that sex work is always degrading to women by virtue of being.
So, any ideas of what to argue next? Or should I just give up? I could probably just avoid the topic, but it’s possible she’ll become a TERF or worse then, if she hasn’t already. I haven’t asked.