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Is this person blind or stupid?

Someone just attempted to post an entire article - an attack by Fern Sidman, a well-known Jewish Defence League activist, on Norman Finkelstein for being a "self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew" - as a comment on one of my articles. I don't know if it was Fern Sidman who posted it, as the email address doesn't reflect the name. Anyway, it says very clearly, in the policies section near the top of the left sidebar, that whole articles should not be posted here as comments. If the article is published elsewhere, leave a link. If you want your own blog, there are numerous places that offer them for free. If you want me to publish it as a guest article, my email address (backwards) is ku.oc.oohay@ku_ojogidni, so mail me and I'll consider it. Unless it's by a JDL nut, of course.

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Well said. BTW how do you check the IP address of a commentator? Any special software needed for that?

It looks like Fern Sidman is a spammer too - that very article you mention has been posted as a comment on Dunner's blog...

DrM: it is passed automatically to MT and stored in the database. The same is true of Wordpress and Haloscan, which is why we were able to figure out that Flanstein had been using aliases a couple of years ago.

What is MT? Sorry but I'm not savvy to how this works.

Is it possible to set up a sort of blog-firewall to keep the trash out? I think the best way to discourage malicious comments is to post their IP address and spread the word.

DrM: MT is Movable Type. It's not possible to firewall them, because they use different IP addresses each time they log in, as is normal with anyone who uses an ISP, rather than a computer in an institution like a university, and has no permanent IP address. So banning their IP would just ban the next unlucky person who logged in and got that IP address. I can't ban them by nicknames either, because they can of course change them. However, if you use TypeKey, you can go through unmoderated, except that I can then just ban your TypeKey if you misbehave.

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