Requests to the lazyweb

Removing all the consonants would take longer but be much more effective.

Jaysus, that was fast – eight minutes from request to delivery!

I had the skeleton sitting around, actually. The previous version inserted “lesbian” every fifth word in an attempt to raise lesbian visibility (a meme started by the famous livejournal user ginmar). So, I just did s/lesbian/vowel/ and changed the regular expression, and it worked on the first try.

Hyw ubiot eno thut rundimle swetchys vuwuls iriand? (How about one that randomly switches vowels around?)

Wouldn’t the Dialectizer also work for the same purpose as the dsmvlwr?

For example, were novalis deemed to be a troll (for demonstration purposes only), his post

It’s not a MT plug-in, because I don’t do proprietary software, but it’s a web form. Note: it only handles the case of y at the end of a word, because I was in a hurry.

could be dialectized to:

It’s not a MT plug-in, on account o’ ah don’t does proprietary sof’ware, but it’s a web fo’m, dawgone it. Note: it only han’les th’ case of y at th’ end of a wo’d, on account o’ ah was in a helter-skelter

using the “moron” dialect or, using the “fudd” dialect:

It’s not a MT pwug-in, because I don’t do pwopwietawy softwawe, but it’s a web fowm. Note: it onwy handwes the case of y at the end of a wowd, because I was in a huwwy

The possibilities are endless.

Whatever, novalis. It’s also not an MT plugin.

[coelacanth wolfson 09:39:19]$ echo alybums -p usaisamONsteruy -p ‘black elf’ | sed -e ‘s/[aeiouAUEIO]//g’ -e ‘s/y / /g’ -e ‘s/ */ /g’
lybms -p ssmNstr -p blck lf
[coelacanth wolfson 09:39:30]$

How about an AOLifier? take the comment and pass it through the mind of the 12 year AOL user: example here.

Peter: Done. My software now removes everything that’s not a consonant, punctuation, or space. Also, it handles numeric unicode entities (which is what my setup sends when I copy-and-paste that).

Unfortunately, it only knows English consonants, so ç will fail.

There’s been an MT plugin for disemvowelment for more than a year. I’ve no idea whether it works properly though.

Thanks for posting that sennoma! I was about to code that myself but I MT has asking me to answer 100 questions. That in order to code something for them for free…
Ok back to half-life 2…

Peter: Good thought. But what about posts which have * used for emphasis? I’ve chosen to only remove * from inside words.

Henry, please, where are the comments you felt needed disemvowelling? Your last Israel/Palestine post appears not to have permitted comments at all. (In other words, how bad is the problem?)

Disemvowelling may be the best approach to handling bad comments. I remember some time ago being a mite bewildered, to quote Daniel Boone, trying to figure out some comments which proved to have been removed.

A removal with a note to that effect is an improvement, but still unsatisfying (particularly if there are replies).

As an alternative, how about the leaving the first and last sentences of offensive posts and obfuscating the rest? Or translating the whole thing into Catalan or Slovakian?

On the dialectizer: Wannabe homie trolls may actually appreciate being Jived up. That’s dangerous. Set the setting to Sewdish Chef. That’s the only way to be sure. Free sample:

A reqooest eeemed et thuse-a oooot zeere-a veet helffvey decent cudeeng skeells – sumebudy, sumoohere-a, shuoold vreete-a un MT-Deesemfooel ploogeen fur Mufeble-a Type-a. Fur thuse-a nut femeelier veet zee cuncept, deesemfooelling, peeuneered by Teresa Neeelsee Heydee, is zee must iffffecteefe-a trull-repellent yet infented. Bork bork bork! Yuoo leefe-a zee trull’s cumment up, boot remufe-a ell zee fooels frum it. Um de hur de hur de hur. It cun steell be-a reed by unyune-a vhu hes a beet ooff peteeence-a, boot mekes zee trull luuk rezeer reedicooluoos. Um gesh dee bork, bork! Su fer, oon zee fery foo oocceseeuns I’fe-a hed tu use-a it, it’s vurked ebsulootely perffectly. Bork bork bork! Zee oonly prublem is thet it’s a beet ooff a nooeesunce-a – it tekes a cuoople-a ooff meenootes tu remufe-a zee fooels munooelly frum zee lunger herungooes. Um gesh dee bork, bork! Seems leeke-a sumetheeng thet a nut-fery-cumpleeceted .cgee screept cuoold eccumpleesh in a flesh – unyune-a oooot zeere-a up tu zee tesk?

I doubt any trolls would want their screeds to be mutated thus.

I’ll admit that I don’t like this. The aim is to humiliate somebody, and although I’m sure that Henry Farrell will be very careful who he chooses for humiliation, can you say the same for the geniuses who run Harry’s Place or Little Green Footballs? Either argue against someone on the merits of what they have said; or, if they just resort to abuse, threats or racism, delete their post.

This is the web equivalent of the idiots who slammed custard pies in Bjorn Lomborg’s face- there are many arguments to be made against Lomborg, but those cowards couldn’t or wouldn’t make them, so they chose the schoolground tactic of embarrassing him publicly. Humiliation as a tactic of argument strikes me as nasty and contemptible, although I’m aware that Mao’s Red Guards and Mussolini’s Squadristi would have politely disagreed with me there.

Btw, the mention of LGF is not just because this is the most poisonous thing on the web, bar Indymedia’s Holocaust denial and sites for Fascist or Islamic fundamentalist groups. Charles of LGF is famous for not deleting any post which advocates the mistreatment of Arabs, but rigorously deletes even the politest post which questions him on his facts, let alone his ethics. Most recently, the US Army veteran ‘Tacitus’ – a registered Republican and no liberal- called Charles, in the most courteous manner, on a number of anti-Muslim lies in his postings on Sudan. Charles deleted every Tacitus post, every post supporting Tacitus and banned their IPs. Why did he have to do this? Because he is so ignorant and stupid that he cannot win the smallest argument with anyone better informed than him.

What will he do now? He’ll humiliate his critics by disemvowelling them- leaving their posts up for all to laugh at, and creating the entirely false impression that it is his critics, not himself, who are fools.

Nice one, Henry and Novalis- I think we can say that you’ve just given a very powerful weapon to any site owner incapable of winning rational arguments.

Dan Hardie is right: yv jst gvn vr pwrfl wpn t n st wnr ncpbl f wnnng rtnl rgmnts.

Then again, those who appreciate rtnl rgmnts will probably just boycott st wnrs f tht srt.

Dan – I think you’re going a bit over the top here. The nice thing about disemvowelling is that it leaves the comment there, and more or less readable. If the owner of the blog disemvowels perfectly reasonable comments, (s)he is going to look like the idiot, not the commenter. Thus, I don’t expect much takeup from the likes of LGF, who want to exclude the possibility of conversation with others who disagree with them altogether.

Bad Jim – my policy on trolls is more or less as follows. For the really nasty ones, I delete the comments outright – there was a persistent anti-Semite who we had to deal with a few months ago, who I simply deleted on sight. When people make very (as opposed to extremely) offensive remarks, I give them a warning or disemvowel them. My category of ‘offensive’ covers people who use bad language to no useful effect other than to offend (the odd bit of saltiness I have no problem with), who express the wish that their ideological opponents were dead etc, who keep on characterizing their opponents in ways that are offensive and shut down debate, or who accuse me or other CTites of lying etc etc (I don’t mind being accused of being a naive lefty, of hopelessly misunderstanding this, that or the other, but just ask that you don’t descend into silly slurs and insults; it’s our blog after all). Other CTites have their own policy (we don’t have a universal approach) – but probably we’re all within a reasonably narrow spectrum. The Israel post was an experiment to see if much more vigorous moderating than usual could produce a proper conversation on a topic where there aren’t many proper conversations in the blogosphere – thanks to the persistent efforts of people on both sides of the debate to resume mudflinging, it failed.

Fair enough, Henry, there’s nothing I can think of that would make some people engage in rational debate.

I think I’d add that the worst humiliation for trolls, users of abusive language, childish individuals etc is to leave their contributions intact, above their names. If, for example, one goes to Chris Bertram’s thread about Orwell, one will see… But I leave you the pleasure of discovery.

I think we’ll politely agree that my criticism of Henry was a little OTT – you know, Squadristi, Red Guards…

I’ve been running into this problem with trolls myself, lately. It’s not so much that that they make stupid arguments (they do), it’s that they turn every thread into an annoying wrangle over the prancing nitwit. The best solution would be if everyone could just ignore them, but it seems that having someone jump into a discussion and announce, “look at me, look at me, I’m a f*cking moron!” is just an irresistible target to even intelligent people.

My current solution is whiteout. I set their comment text to white, on a white background. It’s still there, but you have to select it to see it.

Translate your offensive comments to Navaho. Not even the smartest Germans could figure out that language, and there will be a whole nation of Navahos that could earn some extra dough by doing that for you.

Plus we could all learn a foreign language, which would make the liberal arts people very happy.

Revowel Script: Heh, ask the people who reinvented Hebrew, or the ones who translated the Tanakh (Old Testament).

Troll Hole: Great.

Actually, even better, imho, than disemvowellation would be ROT13.

Een Trowe is een mythisch schepsel van de Eilanden van Orkney, wat op de Skandinavische sleeplijn gebaseerd is. Het overzees Trowes levend onder het water en is zeer lui. Zij zijn naar verluidt nocturnal, en zelfs wanneer zij uit bij nacht komen, zijn zij onzichtbaar aan velen. Trowe is Scots voor sleeplijn.
–
“De wet, in zijn majestic gelijkheid, verbiedt de rijken evenals de armen aan slaap onder bruggen, om in de straten te bedelen, en brood te stelen.”
Anatole France
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Er is een theorie dat de sleeplijnen een ver geheugen van moderne man’s ontmoeten met Neanderthals zijn. Sommigen beweren ook dat Neanderthals goed in historische tijden kan geleefd hebben, en kan worden herinnerd zoals sleeplijnen.