My regular reader may be wondering what happened with my query to the Guardian Comment is Free pages to find out why they had blocked my comment about Tommy Sheridan to the Iain MacWhirter article which had spawned an appreciable collection of pro-Tommy conspiracy theorists.
Well, the Guardian has replied in the following generic terms:
“There are several reasons whhy your post may not have appeared at all
“The first may be the inclusion of words such as ‘poker’ or ‘cassino’ [sic] and some swear words, which are picked up by our junk folder. Another reason may be the inclusion of uncommon punctuation which our system can have difficulties in processing – eg
To address each point.
Did I include words like “Poker”? No
or “Cassino” (or even “casino” or “Monte Cassino”)? No
Or swear words? No, tempting thought it sometimes may be my regular reader will be aware of my self-imposed constraints.
Did I include uncommon punctuation? Well, aside from a semi colon (which experience of correspondence from various sources indicates may be an endangered species), no.
Did I include mutliple links to other webpages? No – none at all.
So, aside from those reasons which do not apply is there any good basis for the “Comment is free” pages withholding a comment suggesting that the Sheridan police investigation was unsurprising given the terms of Lord Turnbull’s comments at the orginal defamation case, while publishing numerous comments suggesting a Scottish police investigation is merely an aspect of a Rupert Murdoch inspired conspiracy controlling the Scottish legal system? My comment wasn’t even (as I amn’t) pro-Murdoch.
So, a poll
Didn’t you know? The ghost of Joe Stalin runs the Grauniad.
¿I confess to being utterly baffled by their excuse #2 – if we «in our CMS code», £J and countless other sites can cøpe wïth non-7-bit-ASCII being input by punters in whatever encoding their browser sends, translating it to and delivering it back out as UTF-8 as Bakunin intended, why can’t the Guardian?
Well, to that, either their web developers are incompetent fucktards or it’s just a handy excuse to include in form replies to disgruntled failed commenters. Or both.