Frequently Asked Questions.


As Staff here on The Observationist, we don't get asked a lot of questions. We like to do the asking of questions ourselves. However, there may be a few things that need addressing. We've gotten feedback on a few things, and we thought it good to clarify.
  1. Comments.

    Comments are really what make the Observationist the vibrant community that it is. Without comments, the site would lose much of it's appeal as a medium for discussing ideas openly. As important as comments are, we need to continually monitor and update our comment system in order to provide a means to allow you the reader to comment, but to protect our web site and our web hosting service from attack by something known as comment spam. Comment spam is similar to email spam in that it places unsolicited and irrelevant comments on our articles. Generally, these comments amount to little more than advertisements for other web sites that are selling dubious and sometimes nefarious products such as sexual enhancement products. The reason comment spammers exist is to try and drive up their rankings in search engines such as Google and Yahoo by having those comments then indexed. The more sites that link to a given site, the higher the ranking, at least in theory. Blasting a ton of articles with spam comments gets the spam commenters what they are after: tons of sites linking to theirs. We don't want to support that kind of underhanded and sneaky tactics, not to mention the products and web sites linked to are not the kinds of things this web site is about nor do we want to promote them.

    We've implemented a number of checks and balances in our comment system, and we've tried to keep the impact to the person making the comment to a minimum. However, no system is perfect, and there are a few minor issues that may come up from time to time.

    1. First is that we've implemented a script to check on things like the email address and subject lines to make sure that the comment doesn't contain things like a blind carbon copy address, or extra line feeds, which comment spammers must rely on to do their dirty work. The email address you type in doesn't have to be a legitimate working email address, something as easy as johndoe@todc.com will satisfy the script. Email addresses are not displayed anywhere on the site, and only the administrators have access to that information. You can use your real email address, and we encourage you to do so, but if you choose not to, that's okay too. First time commenters are sometimes thrown off by this.


    2. The second thing we have implemented is what is known as a "captcha". That is the confirmation code that you see at the bottom of the comment form. We also use this on our email form. This is a code of numbers and letters that is randomly generated, and is displayed as an image, so that a comment spammer cannot look at it with a script and determine what the code is. If the code does not match, the comment is not accepted. This code has a time limit of 600 seconds. That's 10 minutes for those of us who don't think in seconds. If it takes longer than 10 minutes for you to type your comment, the code will expire, and your comment won't be accepted. 10 minutes is an arbitrary number, we had to pick something, and that seemed reasonable. If you know your comment will take longer than 10 minutes, or if you are a slow typist, it might be a good idea to compose your comment in another application like Microsoft Word, and then copy and paste that comment in the comment form. Then, you won't have to worry about the code expiring. One more important bit about the captcha code is that it is case sensitive. Make sure when entering the captcha code that you match the case specifically, or the code will be rejected. The comment form should refresh with a new code, which will allow you to try again. The comment script has recently been rewritten from scratch, so many of the problems with the comment system should be solved. If you have a problem, be sure to report it using the "contact us" link at the top of the page.

    Comments are displayed in reverse order. The newest comment is at the top. This allows you to find the newest comments without having to scroll completely to the bottom of the page. In the case of articles with a high number of comments, this could be a lot of scrolling just to get to the newest comment. It is a bit inconvenient if you need to catch up to scroll down and read your way up, but we found that the ability to see new comments first outweighed having to read comments from the bottom up.

  2. Formatting.

    When you comment, you may want to highlight something in either bold or italics. The comment system we use includes the ability to use simple HTML in your articles, so adding simple bold and italics is very easy. You can use something called HTML tags to signify bold or italic words. Simply preface the word or words you want to be bold with a <b> tag. You'll also need to place a closing tag, </b> at the end. It would look like this: <b>This should be bold.</b>. This text would then look like this: This should be bold. You can do the same thing with italics, which uses the tags <i> and </i> For example: <i>This should be italic.</i> should appear as This should be italic. This simple HTML mark up can be included in your articles and in comments you post on the web site.

  3. Including links.

    Including links is a good way to quote and cite references you may use in your comments. In order to include a link, we'll use another HTML tag and the necessary markup in order to include the link. There are some simple syntax rules that you'll need to follow to get the HTML to work properly. The HTML tag you want to use to signify a link is the <a> tag. The <a> tag needs other information. This information is referred to as an attribute. One attribute that you must include in an <a> tag is the href= attribute. The href= attribute is where you specify what URL you want the link to point to. For example, say I wanted to link to Apple's web site http://www.apple.com/ in one of my articles. I would include that URL in the href= attribute. The value of the attribute should be enclosed in quote marks. Here's what the <a> tag would look like for the Apple link mentioned above: You will notice that the URL is inside a pair of double quote marks. We're not done yet. There is another attribute to the <a> tag called target= If you want your link to pop up in a new window, separate from the window the Observationist is in, you can include the target= attribute and specify that the link pop up in a new window. Here's how it would look: <a href="http://www.apple.com/" target="new"> The double quote marks are important, as they denote the value of the attribute. If you forget one, the link probably won't work right, and it may cause other formatting errors on the page as well. We're still not done yet. Remember how the <b> and <i> tags have to be closed with ending tags? Well, the <a> tag also needs a closing tag. And you'll need to include some text that will become the clickable link on the web page. If you make the clickable link the same as the URL, often it will not display correctly because of the way URLs are constructed on websites. A better way is to include something like the title of the URL to which you are referring.

    It sounds confusing, so this example should help: <a href="http://www.apple.com/" target="new">Visit Apple's Web site</a> That example should appear as: Visit Apple's Web site That's a clickable link, which should open Apple's web site in a new window. Go ahead, try it to see what I mean.

  4. Citations.

    If you refer to a web site in your comment, please make sure to give it a reference. Here's a link to the Modern Language Association's web site for citing references: How do I document sources from the Web in my works-cited list? In the digital age, we all read tons of information on the Web, and that's all fine and good, but we also want to make sure we give credit where credit is due. Make sure you cite your sources.

Hopefully, these answers and tips will help as you become a part of The Observationist.

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