The Washington Post Thinks This Internet Thing's Gonna Catch On

Okay, you may not have heard, but about a week ago, the Washington Post dot com published an article that stated that Abramoff had given contributions to both major parties. This article was posted on a section of their site called Post.Blog, which allowed user comments. Understandably, considering how strongly the GOP and Bush Administration are pushing this very point of confusion, visitors went wild. Comments - according to the Post - got out of hand and started including personal attacks and profanity, both of which violated their "policy." Comments were turned off, and folks have been ranting and raving all over the place since.

No errata has issued.

Well, the point of this post here at Chelicerata is not to harp on this fact, but to point out a couple of very funny facts that I just learned on the McNeil-Lehrer Hour on PBS just now.

The comment system, as set up, had:

1. No Registration System
2. No automatica Profanity Filter

WHA?

If you don't built websites for a living, this may not mean anything to you, but let me say that it's completely baffling that no one thought that this might not work!! The Editor of washingpoint.com was on there, talking about how he's still interested in "this space" [comments from users], but they realize that they're not going to be able to handle this manually.

Oh - ya THINK?!

This is almost like The Post leaving a public "delete this page" button on every page of their site, and then, as they try to go into their backups to get their entirely deleted site back, saying "you know, we've decided that these delete buttons are probably not a good plan."

Wow.