A quick update on some fixes, new features, and such-and-such we’ve made today..

  • Screen names are no longer required to be at least 4 characters. They are required to be at least 1 character. You can change your screen name on your settings page (via the “Account” link in the upper right).
  • Anonymous commenters can no longer post under the names of registered users.
  • HTML is not allowed in anonymous comments.
  • The anonymous commenting form now features actual error messages!
  • We’ve developed the power of avatar-banning, and we’re not afraid to use it.

That’s it for today. More to come. Please continue to let us know if you find any bugs, or have any suggestions.

Anthony Hecht is The Stranger's Chief Technology Officer. He owns no monkeys.

82 replies on “Registered Comments, T Plus 1”

  2. Thanks, Dan and Anthony and company. SLOG is better already.

    And I like leaving the anonitards in, just in lighter gray so we can ID them more easily.

  4. SLOG is one of the cleanest and nicest blog/comments layouts on the web.

    It’s made to be readable, which is what we want.

  9. Registration does not kill Slog. It’s good to have the frequent & long-length people pin a name that’s theirs onto what they say. The sock puppet thing was getting old.

    They’re obviously not nuking anonymous comments, just reducing their impact.

  15. Sorry, but why is this such a big deal? We get these self-congratulatory posts by Anthony about how difficult this was, how hard his team worked, etc. As if comment registration was some kind of groundbreaking thing???

  17. I love that everyone bitching about this is some anonydouche. Wah, I can’t monopolize the conversation with my juvenile bullshit anymore, boo hoo.

  22. Holy crap w7ngman, that’s awesome!

    Now it just needs to let you add registered users to your personal blacklist. Maybe I’ll work on that.

  23. w7ngman, elenchos- how do i use this script? Explain it slowly as I am engineer, and in many ways quite a dipshit.

  24. Google greasemonkey, or find it at Firefox add-ons, and click Add To Firefox, which will have you restart Firefox when it’s done. Greasemonkey was stubborn for one of our browsers; had to restart Firefox a couple times before anything would happen when clicking Add To Firefox. Not sure if it is because the web site is slow or cranky, or if it’s interacting with other Firefox add-ons.

    Anyway, you’ll see it under Tools if it worked.

    Next go to href=http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/48295 and click Install.

    It works on http://slog.thestranger.com/* which you can see under Tools > Greasemonkey > Manage User Scripts… but it turns out that now if you click on the Comments link instead of the Permalink, the comments are under http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/*

    So to get it to work for both, you have to click Add and put in http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/* or http://www.thestranger.com/* (with the * on the end) which I think will also block anonymous comments elsewhere in the Stranger empire. You could leave that out and then use the permalink/comment link difference to view anon comments at will. Or just disable the script via Greasemonkey.

    My clever wife is determined to extend it to let you add a killfile. Stay tuned.

  25. Perfect… what was needed for a long time. Protection against sockpuppeting for the regulars, but anonymity for the concerned/paranoid/depraved. Vielen Dank, Slogmeisters!

  28. This piece of code added to the beginning will give you a killfile for registered users:

    var twitlist = new Array(“elenchos”, “Dan Savage);

    var divs = document.getElementsByTagName(‘div’);
    var i, j;
    if(twitlist.length) {
    for(i=0; i<divs.length; i++) {
    if(divs[i].className.match(“comment”)) {
    for(j=0; j<twitlist.length; j++) {
    if(divs[i].innerHTML.match(twitlist[j])) {
    divs[i].className = (divs[i].className+” anonymous”);
    break;
    }
    }
    }
    }
    }

    Some hints here at the discussion tab: http://userscripts.org/topics/26332

  29. The example above has a quote mark missing at the end of Dan Savage, btw. Hopefully this can be fixed up so it isn’t so technical to add and delete names from your list, but for now that’s how it is.

  30. If you use wildcard coding, you can also kill all Dan Savage complainers and ECB complainers by using something like “Dan*” or “Dan%” and/or “ECB*” or “*wine*”.

    Hmmm … that would be nice.

  31. As usual, Will, you have no idea what you are talking about.

    1. If you did this, the main effect would be to block comments by ECB or Dan Savage. You would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

    2. There is no need for wildcards. The script already blocks comments with any substring that matches the name on your list. This is actually a bug, in a way, but you can be assured that it will block comments that invoke the names of people you are blocking.

    3. Virtually all of the off-topic noise that attacks ECB or brings up $8.99 bottles of wine is by anonymous users anyway, which you are already blocking.

    4. A registered user who was making off-topic personal attacks would be banned in short order so there’s no great need to block them.

    Because of 3 and 4, there is no point in putting up with the disadvantages in 1. The wildcard nonsense in 2 shows that once again you have no comprehension of the things you speak of, yet you speak anyway. Why do you do it, Will? Why?

  32. #79, I reworked this in jQuery and published it as a separate greasemonkey script.

    http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/4858&hellip;

    It only hides exact matches so adding “cho” to your blacklist won’t hide comments by “elenchos”.

    Works on permalink pages as well as comment popup pages. I also updated the anonymous comment filter script to work on comment popup pages.

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