Thursday, August 02, 2007

Little Green Footballs: A great, closed society


Why is the Register to the website
Little Green Footballs always closed?

I have been trying to register there off and on for several months, so that I can participate in the comments sections there. Every time I have tried, I see the Register is closed, preventing new people (like myself) from registering so that we can comment.

I am going to keep a log for each day I try and see that their Register is closed:

August 1 2007: Register closed.

August 2 2007: Register closed.

August 3 2007: Register closed.

August 4 2007: Register closed.

August 5 2007: Register closed.

August 6 2007: Could not open the site at all (tried several times).

August 7 2007: Register closed.

Update: I don’t know how Little Green Footballs works, nor the reasoning behind why the Register is virtually always closed (I’m assuming that the owner, Charles Johnson, feels it’s the only way to manage what must be new seekers of registration too numerous to otherwise handle), but apparently there was a small window of time yesterday (August 3) when the Register was open. Great. The only way, it seems, that I will ever be able to register is to click on LGF every damn hour of every damn day, hoping for that window of time.

Second Update: Another brief window opened on August 4. The problem with these brief windows is that they are not announced beforehand, and the only way a person could benefit from them is by checking LGF at least once every hour, if not more often. I notice that this brief window—itself a separate LGF article—generated 1782 comments.

My suggestion for sites like LGF: Stop worrying about trolls and troublemakers. Who cares if some posters slip in genocidal and blatantly racist comments, or spend a while mucking up the site with spam or whatnot? LGF has a clause of plausible deniability.

And, more pertinently, people like Charles Johnson, owner of LGF, should avail himself of his obviously gigantic pool of manpower: hundreds of members who obviously have time on their hands to assist in monitoring the comments site. Offer them payment for doing so. Why are Charles Johnson and Robert Spencer so fastidiously unimaginative and stingy? By being so, they are actually helping to prevent their sites from becoming arenas of masses of supporters, whose ever-growing numbers and largely beneficial comments and insights would handily outweigh the peripheral nuisances of the tiny minority of bad eggs who would slip through.

5 comments:

Nobody said...

Missed the hotair window? They were open for a few days I think last month. You could also try jihadchat, among others, if you aren't there already. Or use any of your typekey accounts in Debbie Schlussel.

Mother Effingby said...

I know this is hard...took me 3 years to register, and then the first time, LGF wouldn't accept my yahoo or hotmail address. I just recently got registered there, and it is priceless to me. Keep trying. I lurk all the time. One of the things I did was get a My Yahoo page, on which all my favorite sites send RSS feeds and that way, I get immediate updates.
You know from the volume that post on the threads that having open registration would probably melt down the server.
Another two sites I was lucky to register to post to are Lucianne's and HotAir......which is DAMN hard to get on. The only reason I was able to post on HotAir, is because having been an avid fan of AllahPundit, and always writing back and forth to him, I registered within 15 minutes of the site going up! How lucky was that!

Hesperado said...

Thanks jauhara, I'll keep plugging away...

I'm not sure an unlimited registration would "melt the server" (though I don't know enough about the Net to say for sure). Even if that were true, I think Charles Johnson should take the time and money (if necessary) to make the site able to sustain thousands of commenters, or construct a site that has an "appendage" to a mass comments field -- because I think it's important to cultivate an actual social movement for this anti-Islam mission -- formally inducting the readers into and thereby creating an actual society, and thus move beyond merely having sites where reader populations sort of hang on like "guest parasites".

pommygranate said...

Erich

Interesting blog.

I wouldnt waste your time trying to register on LGF tho. Thecommenters are a fairly rabid bunch.

Anonymous said...

I don,t even bother with LGF, There are a host of other sites with far more Info