We got 'dugg' today via the southpark video thread. The link was actually briefly #1 in the 'political news' section, and was on the front page of digg.com for a couple of hours. You can see from above that the site got the most hits since the 5th anniversary, and actually it was a lot more demanding since the majority of those hits came in within the 2-3 hours that we were prominently listed on digg.com. While the server did choke a little bit at the initial 4000 visitors in one hour, it did not go down, and even when it was hit hardest it did still respond, although taking about a minute to display at the very beginning. Simply put, the site was hit many times harder than it had been hit on our busiest day so far (9/11/2006), and it managed to stay up - unlike our last server which in turn went down for over 5 hours from the load. So, I must say I am incredibly glad that we switched to the new server, and it appears that it is able to handle a pretty impressive load, although there is room to upgrade if we ever need to.

I have been royally swamped trying to stay afloat on the site here this week. Quite simply the moderation of comments is getting out of hand. So far the +1/-1 system is working ok, and I will probably start assigning actions to those values at the beginning of the week. What this will mean is that the team members of this site will no longer be the primary control of what comments are removed, but rather that when a given threshold is hit the comment will be removed. So, if you see a comment and think 'that should be removed' then please just vote it down and move on, I am currently using these numbers to scan for the worst of the worst whenever I am around to moderate/cleanup the comments.

We have gotten a few requests now for some sort of chat abilities. I have thought about this a little bit, and quite frankly I don't think this is something that we can fit on our plate. With that said however, if there are any users familiar with IRC - specifically moderator bots, etc. - please let me know. The largest issue I see with this at the moment is that there is no way that we could do any sort of moderation in a chat room since obviously no one can be expected to stay on top of it 24/7. If you have any thoughts on how a chat system might work related to moderation please feel free to chime in. My biggest concern with this would be that anyone (and I mean anyone) could come and subvert the chat and make it pretty much useless. The only possible solution I see to this would be somehow getting a larger number of moderators who could be put in charge, which in and of itself would in turn raise other issues. If someone wants to pick up this project, or specifically wants to handle running a 9/11 IRC channel please contact me.

As for the ad fund raising, that too has fallen to the wayside this week. My intentions are to run a 3 month ad on bradblog.com with the funds (and any other ads we can afford). It had been suggested that we run the next set of ads for this site, but I am still somewhat wary of that. One of the things we have to do for these ads is make use of 300 characters as best as possible. So, if you want to try to write up what you think would be the best use of these 300 characters feel free to have at it, and keep in mind that any of the words can link to a webpage, so having terms in the text as links is definitely a plus.

Please be sure that when you post a comment you take the time to think about whether or not it is going to cause us to waste time having to moderate your comment, or the comments which you will receive in response. The less time we have to waste moderating, or being questioned about our moderation, the more time we can spend on doing something useful. Likewise, I may be setting up a new 'abuse' email address soon for users to email about comments which are beyond our rules, but I'll post about that when it's setup.

Happy Friday.