I just got this little gem in my mailbox:
To: doctorow@craphound.com
X-Personal_Name: : Annoyed
From: moo@cow.gov
Subject: why do we have to sign in for discuss? Fuck this, i'm sick of signingto every little anal cranny.
take it off.
This anonymous coward (get it? Anonymous? Cow? Heh.) wants to know why the discuss areas require sign-in now. Regulars here will know that a couple weeks back, someone started posting abusive messages to the discussion areas, using my name. The only fix for this available to us is to switch off anonymous posting and require sign-in. Other fixes may be available with other message-board systems, but this is what we can do with QuickTopic. If Blogger ever starts supporting message board with clearly differentiated anonymous messages (and forbids anonymous posters from hijacking identities), then you can be sure we'll implement it. Our sysadmin, who donates the bandwidth and hosting for this blog, doesn't want us running executables on his server (fair enough — he's too busy to audit every perl script we might install, and he's already doing us a huge favor), so Movable Type and other local discussion systems are out for now.
But man, I gotta tell ya: When people send me abusive, imperious messages like this, demanding that I change the way I do Boing Boing, it makes me just want to give up. It's our goddamned blog, and if we don't want anonymous posting, there's no anonymous posting. If moo@cow.gov wants to start his/her own blog and permit it, g'head and do it. Jesus, moo@cow.gov, were you born in a goddamned barn?
