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From 12 midnight tonight until about 5 a.m. PST tomorrow morning, Thursday, February 1st, blogs, profiles and all other People-related content will be inaccessible due to a server upgrade.

When the site goes back up, however, you'll find a few new surprises.  First, the People page, your homebase for navigating Bakersfield.com's blogosphere, has been redesigned with both form and function in mind.  Second, under the tab "All Blogs," you'll find an index of all blogs on the site in alphabetical order by blog title.

Finally, when you click on "post something new" to publish your latest blog post, you'll notice something different.  You'll have the option to write a blog post, an event listing, or an article.  Basically, this will streamline the editing and publication process of our citizen journalism program, "Your Words."  Unlike on the blogs, article submissions will enter a queue to be edited and chosen for publication on the Californian's website, in the print edition of the newspaper, or both.  This new way of submitting user-generated content is just another step in the growth of citizen journalism at The Bakersfield Californian.

As always, we invite your feedback on these changes.  See you on the other side!

Attention all you dedicated bloggers and commenters who are up late or up early at your keyboards:  we have an outage scheduled for tonight (or tomorrow, depending on your point of view).

From 1 a.m. to about 5 a.m. PST on Thursday, January 25, you won't be able to access the blogs, profiles or any other People-related content, due to a server upgrade.  We hope this won't inconvenience you too much, and thank you for your cooperation and understanding.  See you on the other side!

UPDATE:  Due to unforseen technical circumstances, tonight's outage has been postponed until further notice.  So for those of you miffed about not being able to post at 3:21 a.m. tonight, you're free again.  Have fun!

My second post on this blog, “Community Rules,” and my last post before the end of the year, “All in Moderation?” were about a subject that, when I bring it up, makes a lot of the regulars around here moan and groan (or worse).  But, as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and it’s time to revisit the idea of community rules, responsibilities, and expectations on Bakersfield.com.  Basically, we’re talking about how we want to treat each other, and be treated, in this virtual community.

I’ve excerpted our Terms of Use elsewhere, and you can click and read the entire document yourselves, so I’m not going to repeat that here.  Since I wrote about other newspapers suspending comments on news stories or temporarily banning anything “not nice,” Yahoo News took its message boards offline because of their domination by a small number of belligerent commenters posting inappropriate content.  Followers of developments at the intersection of journalism and interactive technologies are having their own discussions about how to best combat the bullies and encourage neighborly behavior on newspaper.com websites.

As one regular bloggers here noted recently, I’ve been kept pretty busy lately by some of our more vociferious commenters, but yes, I’m still here.  (You can stop booing now.)  And I’ve got some stuff to say that some of you aren’t going to like very much.

First off, let’s stop with the namecalling.  No more calling each other “idiot” or “stupid,” or worse, in lieu of an argument.  No more twisting folks’ names or blog handles into vulgar parodies.  If you can’t make your point or defend your argument without resorting to base namecalling, then there are plenty of places for you to play, but this isn’t one of them.  You detract from any point you’re trying to make when you go there, and we’re tired of it.

Spurious speculations about posters’ private lives are not welcome.  Insults based on assumptions about individuals’ identities or parts of their private lives are not welcome.  Again, argue your point, use sarcasm and humor and satire to underscore your argument and undercut that of your opponents, but don’t attack the person you’re arguing with.  And if you're on the receiving end of such an attack, that is not license to fight fire with fire.

By now, some of you have already assumed that I’m talking about or to you.  Know this—if this doesn’t apply to you, then it doesn’t apply to you, and you don't need to get defensive.  But if it does, no matter what your political or ideological or religious beliefs, no matter how you identify yourself, I am talking to you.  “He started it,” “I’m just defending myself”—these excuses don’t wash.  Be the better person, walk away, ignore, and report.  Don’t lower yourself.

Some of you have remarked, on the topic of newspaper bias, that it’s all in the eye of the beholder—the left-leaning reader will see conservative bias in the exact same thing that the right-leaning reader sees as evidence of liberal bias.  So it is here.  I’ve been called a commie by a far-right commenter whose abuse of our Terms of Use, and of you, his virtual neighbors, necessitated his removal from this community, at the same time that I’ve been called a fascist and an Uncle Tom by a far-left commenter who was removed for the exact same reason.  And a commenter who does not define himself as either right or left has called me both..  I do none of these things lightly, and I hope you know that.  If I have to talk to you about violations of our Terms of Use, ask you to edit your words, or, if you decide not to cooperate, I have to edit them for you or even am forced to block your access, it has nothing to do with your politics or whether or not I or anyone else here agrees with you.  It has to do with respect—for this place, for your neighbors, and for yourself—and the lack of it.  It pains me to block users who make intelligent arguments that deserve to be heard—but when you drown out your own message with distracting theatrics that defame your neighbors, then this is no longer a place for you.

There are plenty of places on the World Wide Web and in this thing dubbed the blogosphere where you can curse to your heart’s content, where you can preach only to the converted without challenge, where you can refuse to hear what others think, where you can choose to talk only to others who already agree with you.  Many of you already do comment or blog in multiple such places.  There must be a reason you come here, to the virtual representation of your local paper, your hometown.

I’m not asking you to agree with each other, I’m not asking you to stop defending your opinion .  All I’m asking is for you to continue doing what most of you are already doing—talking with each other, debating ideas, disagreeing without attacking, asking each other clarifying questions.  There are so many times when I see folks who vehemently disagree with each other on one blog post complimenting one another or lending support elsewhere on the site, even if it happens to be anonymously.  That is the community I look forward to working with every day, one in which people are passionate enough about their convictions to try to share them with others, but also one in which people respect each other enough to agree to disagree when they must.

I am one person.  You all know that when you get going, you can post a lot.  I’m not going to see everything that might be problematic right away—please don’t take that as a tacit stamp of approval of one point of view and one of disapproval of another, because it’s not.  I rely on you and your help, submitting violation reports, communicating with me via e-mail about both problems and new ideas.

In a recent post about these issues, a journalist whose blog I read noted that, when he was involved with the launching of a community-based citizen journalism website, the creators of the site wrote these words into its “about” page:

"With your help, we will provide a friendly, safe, easy to use place on the Web....  This is a place where you take the lead in telling your own story....  In return, we ask that you meet this character challenge:  be a good citizen and exhibit community leadership qualities.  It's a simple and golden rule.  Act as you would like your neighbors to act."

This is our challenge, mine and yours.  It’s a new year—let’s see what we can do to meet it.