I’ve restored the website template, changing a couple of the images and WordPress features in the process. Please reply to this post if you find any problems or inconsistencies with the new design.

’nuff said. Pardon our dust while we piece things back together.

I’ve made a slight change to our comments system in order to help visitors identify comments that are not from who they say they’re from. One of the problems with our comment system is that anyone can enter any username and any email address, so it’s relatively easy for people to pretend to be, for instance, Jared Axelrod. Well, we aren’t removing that ability– anonymous comments are here to stay. But we are enabling people to register on our site and be identified as who they say they are when they post. These users will be delineated by a red asterisk next to their name. So how do you register?

1. Many systems apparantly recognize our registration emails as spam, so you will first have to temporarily disable any spam filters you may have operating. University users can click here.
2. Next, click the register link under the Meta section on the right side of the page. Write in the name you wish to be known by and an email address. If possible, use an email address with your name in it so that we can be sure it’s actually you. Your address will remain private and we will never under any circumstances give it to a third party. The only publicly-visible personal information will be your username and your website address (if you specify one.)
3. Next, check your email. A password will have been sent which you can later change.
4. Now reenable spam filters.
5. Finally, click the login link under the Meta section of our website.
6. After logging in you will be able to post comments without filling in your information every time.

Any “imposter” accounts created will be deleted. If there are any questions, please feel free to reply to this thread or email us.

UPDATE: We’ve received word that some people are not receiving a password through the mail due to the University’s spam filters. If you’ve signed up but not received your password then you should contact us and we’ll give you a generic password that you can change. If you wish to sign up through a University account then first disable spam filtering so that the registration email can go through, then register, then reenable spam filtering. We’re working with our hosting provider to get this resolved, but this should fix things in the meantime.

Please understand the following things:

1) The is the blog of the OREGON COMMENTATOR we are not, in fact, The Student Insurgent.

2) We have covered this purely as newsworthy, we’ve little to say on the content of the cartoons. Personally, I liked Coppertone Jesus, but beyond that found them mostly juvenile and dumb.

3) Before commenting on the relative merits of funding such speech via the incidental fee, please read and understand Rosenberger v. Rector, NEA v Finley, and especially Southworth v Board of Regents. This is at least a decent sample of the case law involved, grok this before mouthing off.

4) If you’d like to evangelize to the Student Insurgent in addition to us, email them or feel free to give them a ring.

In the midst of all this cartoon nonsense, things have gotten a bit serious around here. Be sure to check out our comments section for some lovely trolling (Hi guys!). I especially like the “JS Mill would’ve spit in your face, you pig” comment by “ray”. Quite insightful.

Thusly, I think it’s high time for a useless filler post to lighten the mood. Among the 1486 key phrases that our lovely cpanel has tracked, there are a few wonderous gems. Most are variants of “Oregon Commentator” or “Insurgent” with something about “Jesus Cartoons” tossed in for good measure. This is unsurprising, as the most recent installment of As Campus Turns has brought out yet another group of students and non-students who just can’t quite get their mind around simple concepts like viewpoint-neutrality and freedom of expression. But, friends, some of the phrases, documented below, are befuddling in their ingenuity and strangeness. So, below I have picked some of my favorites.

Rebecca Newell Nude
cinco de mayonnaise (#2, actually)
how to thank god by giving me this opportunit to work for t charm
why did you kill me mommy?
Gabe Bradley vagina
brett wheat-simms
total net worth uk us japan france
indonesian girlfriend
sideways vagina
what does v.o. mean in a whiskey

As Ian noted below, Total Choice has gotten us back up and running. He’s also provided a new link to the Insurgent .pdf. The file is unfortunately large (9 megs and change) and all the excess traffic sucked up all of our bandwidth in a matter of days. Our usage generally runs about 2-5 gigs a month, this episode spiked it to 10.63 as of this morning, with more on the way I’d guess. To keep us up and running, even with the no-charge doubling of our hosting for the rest of the month (Thanks Total Choice!), we needed to cut down the size of files going across the server.

To that end I’ve replaced the Insurgent .pdf that was hosted on the OC site with a .pdf that says “HOTLINKING IS THEFT. STOP STEALING.” After I get off of work today I’ll update it to include something a little more polite, and the new URL for the “controversial” issue of The Insurgent. Again, I apologize for the inconvienience, but the website needs to stay up and a 461k file is a lot safer for us than one that’s 9 megs.

That said, thanks to everyone who’s been linking to us. Ian did a great job putting together the Insurgent issue for the web, and we certainly appreciate the attention here at the OC Blog. If you’re new, take a stroll through the archive, read a back issue or two, have a drink, do some coke off of Stevie Nicks, kick your feet up, and relax. And, just FYI, we’re far more Reason than we are NRO.

UPDATE: Rude .pdf replaced with this one (and it’s only 23k!)

I apologize for our earlier downtime tonight. This morning we were using 44% of our 10gb monthly bandwidth allotment. By 9:30 PM, we were at 110% of our quota and our hosting provider promptly restricted access. We’re back up for the moment and the Insurgent .pdf is now being hosted at a different location.

As you can see on the sidebar, I’ve re-implemented the recent comments list that we had back when we were using Movable Type. Also, the archive is finally updated.

First of all, to commenter “Nate”, I apologize. In an effort to curb douchiness, well, let’s just say I upgraded my status from bag to nozzle. Having exchanged some email with the more level-headed folks who also post here, I’m going to just own up and say I did the wrong thing. It’s been known to happen with shocking regularity. So, I’m sorry for that, I’ll be leaving comments alone in the future. Email me this permalink if I ever forget it, eh? And feel free to be snarky.

That brings me to item number two, the comments policy. In short, there will be no comments policy. The Commentator reserves the right to remove things we can all agree shouldn’t be posted: actual spam, nazi propaganda, racist bull, links to Barry Manilow songs, etc, but beyond that consider this the official reestablishment of an “open and unmoderated” policy. Wordpress automatically moderates anything with more than two links in it, I (or somebody else) will probably get around to approving those every so often, but I can’t make any promises on timeliness.

Anyway, that’s that, I’ll be seeing you. Probably not, really, but you know.

Please reply if you run into any errors.

Ian and I have been doing some more work on the website to make it look good since we transitioned to WordPress.   We’ve polished it up some more.  Here’s what’s new/fixed since the last updates:

• Ian did major work on the templates and static pages.
• Ian added the links to the sidebar, and fixed up the lefthand links.
• Ian fixed post authors and times in the multi-post / main views.
• I fixed the single-post view to include the author and post time.
• I fixed the wayward bullets that were hanging outside of the sidebar
• Most importantly:  Link to the current issue PDF is now now fixed.

Please comment on this post if you notice visual defects or usability issues with the new blog software.  (Note: We know the donate and merchandise links are not enabled.)

We’ve finally moved over to Wordpress 2.0. There are still some problems and inconsistencies (particularly with the old static pages and the font colors,) but if you encounter anything particularly strange please leave a comment or contact us directly at ocomment@uoregon.edu.

I have taken the following measures:

Turned off anonymous comments. If you don’t want to put in an email, put in a fake one. That’s fine…this should, at least, help stem the tide of comment spam.

Turned off HTML in comments Same deal.

I’m sorry, but the blacklist isn’t going to work because it is larger than the max packet size on our shared server, and thusly cannot be updated. I’m going to try to trim it over the weekend to see if I can reduce duplication of sub-domains and thusly free up some space. Until then, anonymous comments, comment HTML, and trackbacks will all be off by default. Thanks.

UPDATED: I have turned anonymous comments back on, and taken a very drastic step to curb the comment and ping spam. I added .com, .info and .net to the blacklist. Therefore posting any URL, at all, to comments will be impossible. Yes, this sucks. I’m sorry, but until I have time to really trim the blacklist down and try to make it work right, hopefully this weekend, it’s the only thing that’ll keep spammers from sucking all of our bandwidth.

Because MT Blacklist has mysteriously stopped working again and I cannot figure out how to make it function, I have turned off HTML in comments. I apologize, but it’s really the only way to combat comment spam on this old version of MT without Blacklist.

The OC archive should now be up-to-date.Let us know if anything’s missing or incorrect. And yes, the html archive still has horrible holes in it.

Additionally, here is a random picture I found while perusing the blog images folder: