Finding Balance in the Force

Recently the subject of comment moderation or censorship has come up in our internal discussions and via some support questions.

The question being posed is how do we ballance the blogger’s right to control their own site real-estate as well as the commenters right to have their voice heard and their self-expression preserved in some way. Balance this with the need for spam and troll protection and you end up with quite a complicated scenario.

It’s also an important data portability question that we at JS-Kit have an opportunity to solve at scale (550,000 registered sites!).

Right now our thinking is as follows. I would love your feedback.

• The site owner owns their page and must have control over the content displayed on it.
• The site owner does not own the user or their data (including their comment).
• The site owner may edit or remove a comment from their site at any time.
• Edited comments will be clearly marked as ‘Edited by moderator’ so that other users are aware a change has been made. The user will be emailed to notify them of the edit
• The user has the right to revoke their comment if they feel it no longer reflects their original intent
• The edited or deleted comment and the original version is preserved in the user’s visitor profile
• The site owner may have access to the user’s IP address
• The site owner may not have access to the user’s email address unless the user makes their email address public
• Even if the user’s email address is not made available to the site owner, the site owner can contact the user indirectly via the commenting platform
• The user has the right to delete their account and leave the site. They may choose to delete their comments in this proccess as a seperate and distinct choice.

Test Trackbacks

Using this post to test Trackbacks….

Great article:

http://jebcommerce.com/why-arent-they-accepting-my-application/

Learning PHP : Beginner Tutorials

At some point, people who have some knowledge of HTML and/or CSS eventually need to do more, and usually they start wondering if they should learn PHP. Most, in fact, have already played around with it a little because they’ve made some minor adjustments to existing PHP code in WordPress, forum software, or some other application written in PHP. Still, making a few tweaks here and there to existing code, and writing an entire application from scratch are very different, and that’s when many wonder how they would go from point A to point B in order to really learn PHP (and MySQL).

The leap from HTML and CSS to PHP can be fairly wide, so I’ve tried to compile resources specifically to help the true PHP beginner.

Of course, as with all things, there are scads of tutorials on both PHP and MySQL on the web, but that doesn’t mean all are really exceptional - especially for the newb beginner. Frankly, I’ve never found an online tutorial that introduces the generic “concepts” of programming very well, and that would be a great first step. Although the following tutorial gets a little technical, especially towards the end, I recommend reading through it if only to grasp the basic theories that it presents. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it all. Just use it as an overview guide before plunging into PHP specifics.

WordPress integration testing article

ok, here we go!

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!