https://vid.me/wjP7

I still have those pages, and a ways down my to-do list is making them available privately to their authors. You might want the pictures, you might want to publish some of the material on your public author page. Who knows?

But I don’t forget, either.

Somehow, none of this seemed like a problem when I first started posting here (I believe it was during the Bush administration). But it certainly seems like a problem now. I don’t blame Trump for this paranoia, either. I figure as long as Seth Meyers is still on TV, I have little to fear from the gummint.

WordPress by default stores a lot more infromation about you than it needs to, and the worst offender is the comment section: When you post a comment as a registered user, WordPress copies your email address into the comment record. Longtime posters will have hundreds of copies of their email address needlessly stored in the DB. And the comment records also record your IP address and the browser signature.

Relevant aside: We used to think of the browser signature as fully anonymous, till somebody bothered to do a statistical analysis, and discovered that these signatures contain so much detail, they can narrow your identity down from one in billions, to one in thousands. Not quite a bulls-eye on your back, but they’re closing in at that point. Here’s mine that WP stored back in 2011:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.16)
Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.6.16 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0E)

Operating system, language, browser and version, a couple of Microsoft code libraries installed (“.NET”). Maybe one in a hundred thousand, for me.

So, I’m dealing with the comment’s loose lips by purging those needless fields when importing comments into the new site DB, and from future comments, with this filter (language is SQL; the formal name for the browser signature is “user_agent”):

    SET NEW.`comment_author_email` = '';    -- /!/ nuh-uh.
    SET NEW.`comment_author_IP` = '';       -- /!/ nope.

    -- and your browser is nobody's business. But it IS interesting to keep an anonymized statistcal abstract.
    CALL hz.add_user_agent( NEW.`comment_agent`, NEW.`comment_date_gmt` );
    SET NEW.`comment_agent` = '';           -- /!/ nor this.

You can see that I am continuing to track browser usage, but in an abstracted, non personally-identifying way; and scrubbing the information from once and future recording in the DB.

The more you know…

Do any of those criticisms sound familiar to you? Didn’t we ask you over and over again to “Just Stop” and you smugly replied that “Everything is political”. I hate to be the one to say “I told you so.”, but I told you so.

The rules of engagement changed, and you changed them. We’d like it to go back to the way it could have been, and I think that is what Robert is trying to do, and I think we’re willing to work with him on it. If restoring peace here means unconditional multilateral disarmament, and maybe even a partial enforced dilution of the conflict and controversy, then so be it, a UN peacekeeping force of sorts. I can live with that, although I suspect it may not work. Too much has been lost, too much bitterness survives, and the price of peace may be too high, blandness. But don’t expect us to suddenly stop it, let up on you now just because you’ve lost all support and succeeded in turning the entire forum against you. There’s an inevitable inertia at work here, and besides, we’ve seen you at work and know your methods.

I believe we have been willing to meet you halfway and engage with you amicably on neutral subjects. We have also tried to make it clear to you that your presence here is valued, and welcome–when it is not abused. Do we perhaps overdo our response and perhaps are guilty of some of the same crimes we accuse you of? You’re probably right there, TB. I recognize it in some of our posters, and even in myself. But it is hard to see ourselves as others see us, and even if you are incapable of seeing it, you changed forever the way dialogue is conducted on this forum. You introduced, and reveled in, conflict. You were so convinced that our ideology, and therefor we, were so corrupt, weak, cowardly, unscientific and unreasonable that you felt justified in using every tool at your disposal to insult and discredit it, and us. We deserved it, and we knew you felt that way because it was evident in your tone. And then you had the audacity to decide for us just what you thought our ideology was. You never met us halfway, you never compromised, you never showed weakness. You had to not only win, but prevail, destroy, crush, conquer. “Your way or the highway.” Do you think that was just a clever slogan on our part? It was a self-evident law of the TB Zone. Your personal triumph and our whimpering submission was the only outcome you would tolerate.

You may be the last to realize it, but your tools were humiliation and scorn and disdain. You felt you were justified because we were, at best, useful idiots; at worst, statist thugs. I know you will never admit it to yourself, but we are painfully aware of all the kind and gentle participants you drove away with your bitter contempt. Not all of us were street brawlers, they just chose not to deal with it and they left. Am I making this all up? Sure, Tom. We’re all just imagining it. We’re all just out to get you because we’re Liberals.

You really did manage to bring out the worst in us, TB. Changing that is going to take a while, and you’re going to have to carry that weight a long time.

Just stop.

But it was really unnecessary. Anyone who’s been reading along with us would have already known what you set out to prove.