Retraction

Yesterday I alleged that I had been blocked from commenting on the right-wing blog “The Right Scoop”. This allegation is not correct according to an article posted this morning by The Right Scoop. Apparently a number of people, including those with conservative-leaning political views, also were blocked due to an apparent glitch in the Disqus (pronounced “discuss”) system. As such they have gone away from Disqus and have reverted back to WordPress’ built-in comment system with registration required.

As Disqus is the commenting system currently employed by this blog, I think I may be investigating other options. One option I’ve discovered is called IntenseDebate, and I’ve also considered using plugins that link commenting up with Facebook, but I think that would more discourage commenting and discussion than encourage it.

What are your opinions? Do you think using Facebook for commenting be more encouraging for discussion since a lot of people are on Facebook now? Have you heard of other systems that you think may be worth it? I’m open to suggestions.

But again, it appears I was not blocked by a moderator on the site, so I retract that allegation. The one thing that was intriguing is that the comments that were edited by moderators reverted to their original text after they turned off the Disqus system, so you can see what was originally posted as comments before they were edited. And again, debate and dissent will always be welcome here. If you start a flame war, however, I’ll pull out the fire extinguisher.