FYI, our development team is aware of a problem involving signing into and out of Bakersfield.com accounts and losing blogpost and comment text, and is working on the issue as we speak.

Thanks to those who contacted us directly about the problem, and we apologize for the inconvenience.  We'll keep you posted.

I know a bunch of you frequent this part of the blogosphere late at night (I know because I have to read all your middle-of-the-night comments when I come in to work in the morning!), so this is for you:

We have an outage scheduled to start at about midnight PDT tonight, and hopefully it will last only 15 minutes.  However, as the upgrade affects all Bakomatic-powered sites, you won't be able to access the blogs or profiles (our entire People section), the Inside Guide, or the classifieds.  But again, this should be relatively quick and painless.

Any problems, drop me an email.  (Of course, I won't see it till tomorrow morning!)  See you on the other side!

Some folks have been getting a little impatient ever since I let slip, in response to some comments, that we were indeed going to eliminate the ability for users to comment anonymously on Bakersfield.com.  Surprised and aghast that said change didn't happen, magically, over night, more and and more complaints have been raised in recent days.  Well, let me take the opportunity to explain some back-end stuff.  Well, actually, let me let one of my more knowledgeable colleagues on the digital product management and development side explain it:

"Development takes time, as does testing. We want to make sure the things we introduce work.

We roll out new versions of the [Bakomatic software] platform in cycles. So a new feature may be ready to be rolled out, but might be waiting for another (just as important) feature to be tested. There's also many improvements to the platform that are not apparent to the user because they deal with the backend systems. But these features also require development and testing.

One reason we use the release cycles is that it is really easy to take back a release and put the old version of the code up [if something big goes wrong]. If we just released features as soon as they were done, it would be really hard to go back if something went wrong."

The homegrown software that runs the interactive features on Bakersfield.com and all our sister sites (as well as several other newspaper.coms that have licensed the software from us) is complex.  So yes, it'd be nice if, every time we want something fixed or something new added, we could just flip a switch or snap or fingers and it'd happen instantaneously.  But that's not how it works.

So no, we haven't forgotten about the de-anonymizer.  [To share a little more detail, this feature isn't as simple as it sounds either.  What is actually being implemented in the software is that the administrators of each Bakomatic-powered site will have the ability to turn on and off the "make my comment anonymous" option.  It's not a matter of just "taking it out" of the software, or turning it off right now, as that's not how the current version works and we're not the only ones using it either.  Not surprisingly, B.com's the only community on the platform that's had problems with misuse of the anon-comment option.]

And no, we didn't lie, or go back on our word either.  It just takes time, because it's not the only thing being worked on by our developers.  And remember, all the work done on the software that powers this community is toward one goal, improving the experience of you, the users.  So a little patience and understanding would be much appreciated.  As for when these particular changes will be live on the site (when the next version is being released), all I can say right now is soon.

TBC columnist Leonel Martinez explains why he no longer comments on blogs in today's column:  basically, it's because of us.

Bloggers, that is.

The column's title, by the way, is "Owning up to views not the blogger way."

He goes to great lengths to assure us that he's not talking about all of us, or all parts of the blogosphere, but still, you've gotta wonder....  And he never directly mentions his own company's little blog experiment either....

So, go check it out, come back, and tell us what you think.