Thanks to several B.com users for alerting us to a login access problem that was giving active users an "invalid username or password" error early this afternoon. (It was even affecting us!)  It's fixed now--so if you still can't get in, then yeah, it's probably you.  ;-)

(But as always, feel free to contact me directly at jsperber@bakersfield.com to make sure.)

...time for what seems like an annual reminder about our Terms of Use, what constitutes good community behavior here, and what constitutes actionable violations and their consequences.

If you look through my blog archive, you'll see these annual (or more) posts, see the familiar words, year after year.  This year, we thought we'd switch it up, and since a lot of folks, it seems, are questioning my fairness in these matters, I thought I'd let someone higher up have the bulk of the words this year, so please click over to my supervisor's post on the BdotCom blog.

But I do want to say one thing here before I end this post: if you're wondering if temporary or permanent suspensions happen on a whim or without warning, then you've probably never done anything to warrant my attention, because you'd know already that I do make a practice of contacting folks about infractions in the beginning. Permanent suspensions aren't given lightly, and happen after a pattern of behavior or, sometimes, a concentrated burst of violating behavior that cannot be dealt with in any other way.

Fairness, unfortuntely, in a subjective game like this, is in the eye of the beholder, and I try to be as fair as I can, knowing that folks on all sides will disagree with every move I make, for different reasons. But the bottom line is this--for folks who have been around here for a while, you know the rules. You know better. You know when you post something that shouldn't be posted here, and if you don't hear from me, you probably wonder why. That's not license to keep on doing it. Don't pretend that you don't know that cussing out other users and calling them nasty names because you don't agree with them is not okay here. You know that from the get-go.

Look back at all my old posts on this matter.  It gets tiring to ask you, month after month, year after year, to be nice to each other, to argue ideas and not attack people, and then have you do the same things, in more oblique, less obvious ways, over and over and over again.

Dare I end this post by looking to the coming year and asking, yet again, that people treat each other the way they wish to be treated, online and in real life?

Anyway, go read the BdotCom post too.

Another user reports problems uploading this Youtube video using our "add media" --> "add a YouTube video" tools.  So I'm testing if it works for me, using Firefox 3.0.12 on a Mac.  If you are unable to upload YouTube videos to blogposts using the media uploader tools on B.com, please detail in the comments what happens when you try, what you see (messages, etc.), and info re: your browser and OS.

We're following a situation where the servers are under high load, and thus any slowness in pageloads, timing out, or other wonkiness (like having to log back in sooner than normal) are tied to this.  We're investigating and will keep you posted.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

FYI, all Bakomatic sites, including Bakersfield.com's blogs and interactive features, will be inaccesible for about 5 minutes on Tuesday morning, December 30, starting at 8:00 a.m.

The sites will be down to allow for the merging of the Northwest Voice and Southwest Voice sites into the new Bakersfield Voice, ahead of the merge in January of the two neighborhood print products.

If you're on the site at that time, just take your coffee break at 7:59 and come back and log back on at 8:06.  See you on the other side, and don't forget to check out the new BakersfieldVoice.com.

From 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. tonight, Bakersfield.com and all its sister sites will be unavailable due to a hardware upgrade.  If you are on the sites tonight, please log out of your accounts.  When you return, we'll be on the new servers, which will hopefully serve to alleviate a lot of the issues we've experienced in recent months (page load lag, needing to refresh feeds in set increments of time rather than live, etc.).  (Though some of the changes we've promised won't happen right away, as we'll need to make sure everything's working correctly.)  As usual, please drop a note if you see anything wonky.  See you on the other side!

So, of course it has to happen that on a weekend during which I, unfortunately, have no internet access at my house (a situation which hopefully will be rectified soon), things get, shall we say, a little heated around here.  Or more than normal, rather.

You know that I make it a personal policy to keep interpersonal disciplinary actions between me and individual users as private as possible, so I'm going to be more vague on a few fronts here than you'd probably like.

First, regarding suspicions about who has and has not been disinvited to participate in this blog community, let me set something straight.  If a user has been suspended (temporarily or permanently), then going to people.bakersfield.com/home/blog/USERNAME will result in this message:

Unknown Blog: The blog you requested could not be found. The user may have removed the blog.

Of course, that also happens if an active user goes private.  So to make sure, you can go to people.bakersfield.com/home/user/USERNAME.  A suspended user will display this:

Inactive User: The user profile you requested is not active.

A previously public profile that has merely been taken private will show you this:

Private Profile: The user profile you requested is private.

And of course, a public profile that is still active but simply hasn't been either logged into or used for posting will show that information ("last signed in" date and datestamps on most recent blogposts and comments).

So that should clear up a bit of the rumormonging on that count.

Now, let me repeat what I said elsewhere about the whole thread-locking/comment-blocking mechanisms and issues:

First, we agree that the language that appears at the bottom of the screen in place of the comment composition box, in red type, should be different for threads that are locked by admin and for threads from which an individual user is blocked from participation.  The developers have added this fix to their list, and thank you all for this input.

Second, the ability to lock a thread to further comment from anyone is an admin privilege accessible to only a few staffers here at B.com, and is usually only exercised by me in my role as community content manager, as a community management tool when I've decided that, for example, a thread has been derailed and become a flame war and that further on-topic, constructive comments are not likely to be forthcoming and I need to stop the further posting of inappropriate content so I can clean up what's already there.  (Locking a thread also makes one's comments on the locked thread uneditable.)

Third, we gave users the ability to manage certain aspects of their profiles and blogs that had previously been beyond their reach in order to give you some degree of control over your own profiles and blogs, while, of course, retaining others as the hosts of a newspaper-based interactive blog community.  The ability to control who sees your status updates, from whom you receive messages or status updates, and who can and cannot post comments to your own blogposts--we felt that, due to previous interpersonal scuffles, deletion/reposting wars, and accusations of harassment based on unwanted attention or participation, these were aspects of one's own profile that we could afford to let individuals have more control over.  We had hoped, of course, that these tools would be used sparingly and that they would lead to less overt conflict, not more.  Seeing these tools used in practice has been educational, and we are mulling a variety of ways to tweak the tools to make them better serve the community.

Okay, now about temporary and permanent suspensions.  The first level of discipline for TOS violations here, depending on the severity of the violation, is usually a quick [edit.] on my part and an email to the offending user letting them know what I edited and why.  That usually ends things right there.  If a pattern exists that shows that my earlier communication didn't get through to the user and another incident occurs, I suspend the account (which hides any blogposts by the user and the profile as well, but doesn't do anything to existing comments on others' blogposts) and write to the user.  I explain why the account has been suspended and offer a temporary suspension, usually lasting about a week.  I give a date upon which I will reactivate the account, if, by that time, I am in receipt of an email from the user explaining that s/he accepts and understands the TOS and will follow the rules, especially those broken before, upon her/his return.  The user is also made to understand that if s/he continues to violate the Terms after being let back in, the suspension will be reinstated and made permanent.

If a user chooses to ignore my email and create a new account to circumvent the suspension, or writes back to refuse to cooperate, the suspension becomes permanent.  So, if I write to a user explaining how s/he can return from a short temporary suspension by agreeing to follow the rules, and s/he responds by refusing to accept the terms, that makes the temporary suspension permanent.  There are plenty of users on these blogs who have politely agreed to the terms of return from temporary suspension, waited the week out, and come back without problems.

Now, to the issue of community culture.  A great many of you from a variety of religious, political, cultural, subcultural, and ideological backgrounds have adopted this virtual place as a home and space within which to have discussions and hash out differences, even knowing that you aren't necessarily going to change each other's minds, and many of you have thus become protectors of this space, handing out warnings when I'm not around, reminding each other of the rules.  And for that I thank you.  While I've seen many rivalries and enmities thrive here over the past couple years, I've also seen folks who disagree with each other on issues they deeply care about still "hang out" virtually (and even in real life) and get along, and I've even seen folks who've had nasty, escalating conflicts learn, over time, to set those differences aside and get along.

I used to teach ninth graders.  I remember banging up against this mentality, over and over, among my students, that any slight, real or perceived, had to be dealt with with the utmost force lest face be lost.  The old "they looked at me funny so I have to fight 'em" cliche.  The ambiguitiies of text-based cyberspace make this kind of thing even more prone to flare-ups.  Online culture has its own terminology for this kind of stuff--trolls, flamewars, etc.  What Bakersfield.com endeavors to do is to reinforce an online community and culture in which we don't let that stuff grow, we don't let it fester.  It's not easy, and it's all subjective, so of course somebody always feels they're getting the short end of the stick.  But when someone offers advice, say, on how to make your comments more readable when you quote other people, or offers some advice, based on experience, about following the rules here (like the fact that profanity isn't okay here), take it in the spirit offered.

If you think you're being insulted or attacked or treated unfairly, I'm not saying to lie down and take it.  I'm saying to think about how you respond.  Are you escalating things?  Are you breaking TOS?  Hit "report a violation" and explain it to me.  Remember that if you're doing it after hours, at night or on the weekend, it might take me a while to get back to you.  And if, on a work day, it's taking too long for you, ping me again and ask me what's up.  Also, please know that, unfortunately, the violation report doesn't copy the original text of the reported comment or post into the email that I'm sent, so please copy and paste whatever you want to make sure I see.

We don't have to all agree here.  But we can disagree without resorting to personal attacks and using profanity and other unacceptable language.  We can remember to properly source content that is not our own original work.  We can vehemently disagree about one issue on one thread and laugh about something else together on another.  We, from all ideological points of view, can do well to examine our language for polarizing words and phrases and figure out other ways to get our points across.  We can recognize when it's time for us to step up, own our part in an escalating disagreement, and end our part in it so as to stop feeding the flames.  We can figure out when, in responding to a sleight or perceived sleight, we've crossed the line into doing the same kind of thing we're upset about being the target of, and shut it down before it even gets going.  We can do all of that.

I'm sorry this is so long.  Even at that, I'm sure I left something out.  Have a good evening, everyone.

 Good morning, B.commers!  I have a few site-related things I need to talk about, the first of which is something we need your feedback on a.s.a.p., so please leave a comment below.

First, we all know that the originally 15 minute, now 5 minute cache refresh on /recentblogcomments, designed to help with the load lag problem, is an imperfect solution.  Part of the problem is that when the cache is refreshed to include new comments, the entire archive is rebuilt--check out the pagination links at the top and bottom, there are over 2000 pages of 50-comments-per-page.

So, a solution that would allow us to go back to real-time updating on that page would be to limit the number of page links available to view.  Instead of being able to page through 2000 pages of comments in reverse chronological order, we'd limit it to, say, 5 pages. Older comments would get bumped off the bottom of page 5 by newer comments coming in at the top of page 1.  They wouldn't be gone--they'd still be live on blogposts, archived on people's profiles, etc.--you just wouldn't be able to page through pages of reverse-chronological-order comments that are really old.

So, my question is, how many pages of old comments do people need?  How far back do people go on /recentblogcomments, on average?  Is 5 pages of 50 comments each enough?  A look at our metrics suggests that it is, but I wanted to get your opinions.  So, have at it, and thanks.

[Edited to add: We need to change the pagination links today, but the caching timeframe won't change until next week.]

The other things I wanted to mention are a continuing bug and a new feature.  First, the bug: the ability to save blogposts as drafts to work on for later is still broken.  We're working on it, but please don't try to use it right now, or you'll lose your content.

And second, the new feature: in the past, folks who've asked about changing their username have been told it wasn't possible.  Now, it is.  However, please know that changing your username will change the part of the URLs of all your blogposts that is your username, so any extant links to those posts using the old URL will now be dead.  If you need to change your username for some reason, please contact me directly.

For a period of about 2 hours this morning, all Bakomatic-powered sites were off-line due to a database problem which has now been addressed.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

FYI, we are aware of site problems including increased page-load times on Bakomatic-powered pages and pages with Bakomatic feed content (like the homepage), logged-in users being logged out and forced to log back in even when they had just logged in (myself included), and error messages marking users as inactive (when they are not).  These are connected to database issues that our developers are currently investigating and endeavoring to ameliorate.  We apologize for the inconvenience.