Reply To: Moderator


#57515
mods-cm-org
Guest

Hello Kim

There is no record of the 403 incident in our activity logs (although the site admin may have access to lower level information). A 403 error is generally indicative of an illicit HTTP request (i.e. a bad URL or script data), though it can have other causes – see the Wikipedia entry for HTTP 403. The problem is unlikely to be due to a server misconfiguration, as we haven’t had any similar reports from other people; anyway, as you’ve been able to post other messages without incident it appears there must have been something peculiarly amiss with the data being transmitted to the server – or perhaps with the SSL connection (if you spent a long time composing it). To eliminate other factors, you could try posting the same message via a different browser; if that method isn’t successful, you can try resetting your internet connection. If all else fails, kindly send us the message via email for further investigation.

Thank you for drawing our attention to developments in the “Elections Aftermath” thread. I see that a recent interjection from another commenter sidetracked the main political theme of the thread, and was quite discourteous. Accordingly it flouted existing commenting guidelines, rendering it eligible for suspension and redirection, or deletion without explanation. I’ve suspended it for now, though I appreciate you’ve already composed a response. The author is welcome to repost those thoughts as a new topic, with a more respectful attitude.

The tangential issues raised in that interjection have already proved highly controversial and disruptive in the BTL comments section of the main article threads. As with other perennial controversies (such as 9/11 and climate change), distracting comments are routinely suspended and redirected towards the discussion forum, with advice to create a new topic to avoid derailing ongoing discussions. In this case, the controversial points should have been raised as a separate discussion topic to which the commenter could then refer, to keep the “Elections Aftermath” thread focused on the electoral legitimacy of the current government and its abuse of power. In the BTL comments section, we would normally suspend the troublesome comment and append this general advice as a private moderation message visible only to the comment author – but unfortunately we’ve discovered that when forum replies are suspended for moderation, they are no longer visible to the author. We may need to develop a different strategy for moderating forum discussions.

Regards,
Mod.