Welcome back to Comment Of The Day! Every day, we read every single comment posted on our site and pick the one that made us laugh, get informed, or feel warm inside. You don’t have to go into our comments sections and write thousand-word stories about why you love a car so much, but a lot of you do, and that means a lot to us. So we’re highlighting some of the most excellent bits of thought that you’ve formed into words and digitized onto our website. Today, Matt gave you some good news about our commenting system. We’ve switched our system to Memberful, which you’ve likely noticed the instant benefit of cutting our loading times in half. Now, you don’t have enough time to brew a cup of coffee and do your taxes before an Autopian page loads. And for us, maybe we can get away with uploading a photo larger than 200kB without blowing up the site. Along with Memberful, we’re also soon to roll out a new commenting system, one where you can upvote comments, add in media, get notifications, have threads, and more! And if we can iron things out, we might be able to get you photo uploads, too. All you have to do is wait until mid-January! There’s an extra benefit that comes with the new system, and it’s that we now have multiple ways to banish bots, spammers, and unruly commenters to the black tanks of Jason’s dead RV. In recent months, this site was flooded with spam and scam comments. Some of these were clearly bots, but some appeared to be humans acting like spambots. Weird. Back then, getting rid of them was a manual process, and often involved simply editing their comments into something ridiculous because we couldn’t actually stop them. Now we can, and in response to this news, we’ve got a great one-liner from strangek. You’d been asking for one-liner COTDs, and strangek delivers on the humor; I’m chuckling right now as I write this: Pour one out for Paula, for she is going to be blasted from our pages, and boy were those many pages. Look at the damage she left in her robotic wake:
Now we have the tools to get rid of the vast majority of these bots, and they might now find themselves unemployed. How else are they going to inform you how to make $80 an hour online, or that they are of a certain age and own photographs? Won’t someone think of Paula!? Well, she can still be a part of this community, but she might have to shill headlight fluid, or perhaps muffler bearings. One of my last edits to her comments had her saying: (There is no onlytrees.com). I’m going to miss editing spammers’ comments, but only a little bit. Good riddance. As a note, we are reading your feedback! I am serious when I say that we actually go through each and every comment posted to our site in a day. And since the launch of COTD, we even have discussions over who had the best comment. That’s how much we care about this community. So just keep doing what you do, including these one-liners. We love you! I Wood, the definitive guide to erotic wood knots. “Here’s the sign in link you requested to access automotive nirvana. It can only be used once and expires after 24 hours, like most of David’s cars.” “Hі.. Мy nаme іs Pаula, І’m a 224 yеar-оld elm tree. І lоve bеing phоtographed in the bark. Plеase ratе my phоtos аt onlytrees.com” But I’m not sure anything will top the alligators on meth comment thread. I can’t find that now, I believe it was in one of those unhinged rants from our beloved Torch. Can you narrow that down a bit? You’re going to have to be more specific. My brain wants to say that it involved a specific car but idk for sure, I’ll have a look. But maybe there should be!!! /Old old lighting company joke That is awesome, because in my experience it is the only really reliable way to ensure good moderation, and a robust, consistent moderation regime is absolutely critical to maintaining a healthy commenting community. It’s a little bit ironic because it runs so counter to the free speech absolutism that was such a big part of the Internet’s early culture, but at this point the evidence is pretty hard to ignore: if you want good conversations you need good moderation, and to get good moderation the moderators have to be engaged with the comments. I hope you can find a way to keep it up as the site grows, and may God have mercy on your souls. We’re seeing how well that works on another site. Don’t let anyone buy The Autopian for anything less than $1B! (That would be a great payday for all concerned, free swag to every commenter, even Paula, and still enough left over to start a new site, perhaps The Pianauto, covering automobiles that incorporate keyboard instruments.)
