Category Archives: Discourse.net

Version 1.01 of my comments policy, which has served well since November 2003, read:

1. Participants in the comments are kindly requested to be civil, and at least vaguely on-topic.
2. I will delete (or disemvowel) comments that are duplicative, commercial, needlessly foul or mean or otherwise inappropriately offensive
3. My decisions are final. I’m happy to discuss them by email.
4. I’ll amend this policy as I gain experience.
5. In the long run, it remains to be seen if comments is a workable commons or not.

For the avoidance of doubt, however, as of today I’m moving to version 1.2

1. Participants in the comments are kindly requested to be civil, and at least vaguely on-topic.
2. I will delete (or disemvowel) comments that are duplicative, commercial, needlessly foul or mean or otherwise inappropriately offensive.
3. Instead of deleting a post, I may disemvowel the URL to commercial sites even if a post is arguably on-topic when I believe the poster is engaged in a pattern of linking to different commercial sites under false names.
4. I will use blocking software to block links to sites using words or strings commonly associated with commercially oriented blog posts or references
5. I will ban the IP number of any poster who serially violates this policy.
6. My decisions are final. I’m happy to discuss them by email.
7. I’ll amend this policy as I gain experience.
8. In the long run, it remains to be seen if comments is a workable commons or not. I will not have my work be used as billboard for your ads (at least, not without a cut, and this is a resolutely non-commercial activity). I’m prepared to turn off comments if vigilance proves too time-consuming.

My Friday McBush Bashing is growing out of control as the news world goes all Palin all the time (and as she hides from the media in a secret undisclosed location — in the best GOP Veepish sytle).

Do I let it keep growing, or do an interim edition?

('Soulmate' reference for those who came in late)

Paul Caron counts blog stuff, and he says that Discourse.net is 15th in the new Law Prof Blog Rankings.

I'm continually grateful for (and bemused by) the size the of the readership.

Readers are invited to describe themselves, and of course are always welcome to comment.

The folks at Mapstats seem to have fixed their visitor location reporter, so I've restored it to my sidebar. Hello to my visitor from Podhori, Hlavni Mesto Praha, Czech Republic! Please note that, unlike John McCain, I am aware that Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist anymore.

(And Happy Bastille Day to any French readers and Francophiles everywhere.)

This might be a good time to remind readers, especially those who read via the partial or full-text RSS feeds that I welcome your participation in the comment threads too.

Incidentally, why is that so many more users of RSS feeds choose the partial rather than the full feed? Not that I'm complaining, I'm just curious?

I’m pleased to announce that my brilliant young colleague Ben Depoorter will be guest blogging here until the end of the month. I may post occasionally, but my internet access will be erratic as I travel about for a while.

Ben is multi-lingual, multi-cultural, mutli-talented (he paints!), and a prolific writer, primarily in law and economics and property law. He’s also very funny – for an economist.

I’ve invited him to post on any subjects he likes; it should be interesting.

Mapstats, from Blogflux, the people who provide that nice little list of locations of recent blog visitors that runs in my right margin, seem to have had some serious problems this week.

For a while their widget was holding up the rendering of this page. Then that got better, but the actual cities being reported on the right didn't change for almost a day. (It is possible I messed up the code in some way while trying to fix the problem, but I don't think so.) Then it went back to not rendering.

So I've killed it off at least temporarily and sent an email asking what is going on. Pity. I liked it.