Yes, I noticed that - good job.

So not calling one a "troll" is not a good pre-condition?

lol. Great logic there.

Hey, glad to see you back!

'scuse me, I meant "immature, arrogant, inconsiderate, and self-deluded troll..."

But, as trolls go, 77, you're an amateur.

The pro's are much more subtle.

a choice not open to main-page Cafe guests.

I doubt that, Tom. Looks to me like they gave us the Movable Type posting that the contributors have always had. They've been using Movable Type posting for quite some time, even when TPMCafe wasn't using the system. Just like we are doing now, you get transferred to a different software system when you hit "blog now," you even have to sign in to it. That's what they were doing all along.

I suspect the contributors have all the features on that enabled while we don't (some of our buttons are "dead," if you have played around with the menu.)

Remember, in the past there have been a couple of instances where contributors have removed a comment, by mistake--I think Steve Clemons was one of those? Well, you can see when on the Movable Type archive of your blog posts where you can look at all the comments on your posts and there is the ability to tick them to delete them. But the actual mechanism is shut off to us. It's probably not shut off to them. That's why the Clemons thing happened. They also have always been able to edit their posts after published, we just got that with the Movable Type.

They probably have the ability to shut off commenting. But they have no reason to want to do that. And I am sure most of them are smart enough to know that if they did it, it would cause a big brouhaha and management would ask them to turn comments on. After all, they are being invited to post to a "Cafe" for discussion purposes. Especially Book Club, would make no sense to shut off comments, they are trying an interactive way to sell their book. If they didn't want feedback, they would be demanding silence at book signings, and rely on advertising alone.

And a reminder: Josh Marshall has always has his comments shut off.

Yes I remember Billy going on about that. I suspect he was probably requesting that because he himself has a blog on the Movable Type system, and had seen the settings where the owner can turn that on and off. (We didn't have that til now.) And I can see that the Movable Type blogging they have given us now has the ability to delete comments from your own posts, but it looks like that that ability is shut off to us.

For those who have never dealt with this kind of thing, the way all of this group blogging software works is that there are levels of permissions for all the features. When you open up your new software, there's long lists of choices about which group is allowed to do this, which group is allowed to do that, and they usually offer you several levels of management groups you can make. So like a moderator can do certain things that a member can't do, but you don't want a lowly moderator futzing with your layout or architecture, that you leave to a higher up.

And it's often quite complicated stuff, you get a huge menu when you have high level permissions, with bells, whisteles, buzzers and buttons, and I would think some busy contributor type persons who are technophobes might have extra powers enabled but wouldn't even bother looking at how to use it all. They just want to get to posting their content, and pay attention only to a few buttons.

I also suspect from the few times I've delved into such things, it might be a real pain to go back and figure out how to change settings after the fact if you don't know the system well. Sorta like trying to fix something Windows is doing that you don't like, without one of those fat instruction manuals with an index to look up how to do it.

BTW, I think they created the Dashboard function so that people of different audience preferences could have a tool to somewhat filter who they were interacting with, without giving people the total power that Billy was requesting, which would probably cause more havoc than it would be worth. When they finally have comments lists updating properly as a way to track conversations more long term, it will help a lot with ignoring those you might wish to ignore and finding those you'd like to interact with.

Seriously, Bwak. How do you manage to find every fowl comment on TPM. You are too funny :)