Dear friends,
I have not made a few things clear in my post about the changes to the comments section. So let me clarify that now:
- Signing up will NOT cost you a single penny. This is a 100% FREE signup, not a Patreon-like membership.
- Right now, please do NOT send me requests to sign up. I will inform you when we are ready to process your applications, until then, there will be no changes.
- You will get your credentials at the time of signing up. As of right now, we are not ready yet to start delivering them.
- Please do not email me questions about this, I simply have no time to answer so many premature questions, sorry! I ask for a little more patience!
I hope that the above is helpful.
Many thanks and kind regards
Andrei
“Singing up”…..good one :-D. All the best!
Good eye!
I regret I am a baritone, right in the middle of the lucrative ranges.
Duuuuuuuuude!!!
I am barely coming out of COVID and the associated “head fog” and, besides, I must be the worst blogger on the internet in terms of typos, silly built sentences, etc. etc. etc.
Oh and English is my 3rd or 4th language (depends how you could).
So brace for A LOT worse than just that, LOL!
I even my typos in the titles, so I am beyond hope.
I tried editors, but that just slows down the process.
I just hope that finding typos all over my writing is not too much a price to pay to read them.
:-)
Kind regards
Andrei
I am deeply honoured to have been approved to singing up from time to time in this honoured place, and will do my best to contribute in a qualitative way.
Amarynth is a super talent, I hope she will still contribute to benefit the world now the real master is back.
Best wishes to Saker+ from my place.
Sounds like a good new Policy, Mr S. I applaud it. And it’s entirely understandable.
Thanks for the clarifications, which answered the most important questions. And welcome back!
I discovered this blog in 2014, after I was banned from posting in the Guardian UK comment sections.
Here (on the Saker Blog), I was given an opportunity to hone my tools of discernment in regards to geopolitics, Russian governance, Christianity, Islam and many other important subjects. I’m very grateful for that!
The point is that my previous comments (from 2014-15) could’ve been easily qualified as a 6th column, or some Patriot mythologist, etc… All of that to say, is that a rushed judgment might not be super beneficial to people who’re just waking up.
I know that this blog is aimed at those who are already have focused and well developed optics, to see the world with more clarity, but a bit of intellectual mercy can definitely help a lot more people.
And just to be clear, I don’t mind signing up at all.
Thanks for the clarification
Too much trouble. A comment bureaucracy
I am sorry, but I don’t really understand what you are trying to say.
Can you please make sense of these 2 three word sentences for me?
Let me explain. You are creating a new system – a bureaucracy – that serves as a barrier to speech – commenting. That system requires information – an email address – that grants the prospective commenter a user ID. These email addresses will be centralized on your servers, available for the relevent government to obtain via legal process when the need (i.e., their need) arises. Without the email address stored on your servers for the govenment to obtain when the need arises, a user is not allowed to comment.
Then you need to do some work yourself.
Use Tor ( https://www.torproject.org/ ) to access thesaker.is, always.
When registering for the comment system, install I2P ( https://geti2p.net/ ) and create an email address in their system (Susimail). Use that email address and keep it alive by checking it each 6 months or so.
And that’s it. If thesaker.is is raided, the data is tor IP addresses and a useless email.
Set up your on website then if you don’t like it & comment all day long, every day, for ever, to your hearts content.
I’ll say it again, this is long overdue, there are way too many trolls here & basic mindless idiots. Andrei is doing the right thing, it is his site, he can do what he wants.
No one is forcing you to create a free, anonymous email that can be used not only on saker but also on Gmail, YouTube etc.
Means, keep it as it is Mr. Saker. Dont make changes. Some of us don’t feel comfortable leaving any info about us. And we are genuine readers.
The comment bureaucracy requires us to give up our rights to anonymity for the right to speak on your site. For those who speak the words our government wants, this is not a problem. For those that wish to speak freely it is an issue.
the “right to speak on your site”…?
Somehow I get a feeling that the contribution you could make here is not as big as you believe.
You don’t think that you leave any trace behind you already, on this blog, or other places on the internet?
Seems like we have a new type of complainers/trouble-makers.
Or maybe they just fit into the “entitled ones”, only with the addition about how the “government” is tracking them because their smart and revolutionaty comments are too dangerous for the PTB. They can only comment “anynomously” on this blog, because they are moving around the internet without leaving any trace….
Currently in order to comment you have to give name and email address – two pieces of information. If the sign-up requires you to put in a user-id and a password then you would have to put in two pieces of information. Effectively no difference whatsoever in terms of effort. And if it helps the blog it’s worth it.
You are assuming the email won’t be verified before an account is granted. That‘s a big assumption given that something will have to, in fact, be different to call all of this a change with meaning and purpose..
No, not assuming that at all. The act of sending the log-in credentials to the email address supplied will verify the address automatically, as will re-sending lost or forgotten passwords depending on the precise way the authentication system is set up.
If you really want to pre-verify an email address then you can just send a Welcome email to that address and ask the email server if it was accepted by the server. Or send a code needing to be emailed back but frankly I couldn’t see a blog needing anything like that.
Signing up, passwords, usernames is “bureaucracy” to them. (I feel like you.) Other than for work, if it’s for a pleasant activity, I feel most people are deterred by signing up processes on the Internet. All my commenter work for 50,000,000 hits has been in vain.
I made it to #2 “Top Commentator Last 30 Days” in the Dashboard the two times I checked. Today, I became #1 with a count of 232, #2 is at 226, and number 3 at 166. I’m not sure what it means. It’s almost poetic to me. I get this for the labor. Bureaucracy is something else!
Unfortunately, only a human being is able to keep up with the computer hacking. Software cannot be relied on.
I suggest that we fill in three text boxes before being permitted to post our comments. For example, in the first block I would type my name. And in the second, I would type: GROUP A: the sincere (however misguided) ones. And in the third I would write: “Religious nutcases and assorted Bible-thumpers.”
Then, your software could sort and file the messages automatically without the moderators having to do so much work. It would require honesty on the part of the commenters. But I, for my part, am certainly willing to be as honest as possible!
That way, there’ll be no surprises or reasons to threaten anyone. And if anyone comes to the site specifically looking for messages from religious nutcases or Bible thumpers they’ll more easily be able to find those that I have posted. What do you think?
I think it suffers from two problems. Firstly that, while you are an honest man, trolls and bots aren’t and it would be too easy for such software to fill in the text boxes under false pretences. So people like me, searching among the nutcases, couldn’t find you for trolls.
Secondly, and perhaps more seriously, the range of what can be done on this blog is pretty limited. It will be a question of finding a pre-built working solution that can be plugged-in rather than writing custom software for time, cost and security reasons.
Hi, Andrei!
Just wanted to (belatedly) welcome you back and express my sympathy regarding your Covid. (“If it’s not one thing, it’s another…”, eh?)
Your ideas from the previous post and this one regarding blog changes seem eminently sound to me.
Best wishes for a speedy and FULL recovery!
Saker – it is a pleasure reading your analysis. Over the past five years, it has opened my eyes to many things not least the Anglo-Zionist empires and Zones A and B. The comments are (sometimes) a bonus, like the open letter from Africa to Putin.
If too much maintenance is required over the comments, I am quite OK to accept disabling the section. My suggestion to you is NOT to let yourself get distracted from what you do best. Isn’t that the idea of cyber attacks and trolls anyway to silence you?
God luck and God bless.
What is this about singing! I cant bloody sing if my life depended on it! Will I have to convince my sister to make comments for me? And she does not always agree with me!
This is a huge obstacle to commenting on political matters, its kind of censorship on the whole blog! But OK, it is Andrei’s blog so he decides! I will start practicing DO-RE-MI-FA-SO-LA urgently
Andrei,
It saddens me that you have had to moderate the comments on this blog. I have found many comments to be intelligent, insightbul and on point. Now that you have gained fame or at least notariety among your readers and elsewhere I suppose it was inevitable. I hope your continue your sage, insightful comments and analyses of current events and do now allow the onslaught of negative and/or machine-generated comments to deter you.
All the best,
Steve Lambert
Just to say how much your work and the work of your colleagues is appreciated!
Your move to tighten up commenting access is entirely understandable, given the pandemic of bots, trolls and spam now endemic to web forums.
Other sites have attempted automatic filtering of, for example, those very annoying get-rich-from-home scammers – but failed.
Then they tried requiring a signup and authentication process – and still failed. The scammers were happy to go through that process in order to gain an opportunity to slip their spam posts through the net.
It seems that the only way to reliably filter out all the intentionally or circumstantially counterproductive posts is by intensive human intervention to screen all posts. Either that, or some powerful AI utility.
FWIW – no complaints, just an observation – the concerns around anonymity raised by some forum participants are real, given the increasingly totalitarian bent across the Western world. Here in Australia, we now have the Federal Government pushing its “Trusted Digital Identity” legislation, which will open the door to 100% government tracking and control of any and all Internet access. This is not a comforting prospect, with far worse yet to come.
Surely, with your considerable audience, there must be SOMEONE out there who can offer an optimal solution? Otherwise, welcome to the Saker’s registered accounts forum (again, no complaints – it is what it is).
Please, please, do NOT go down the ‘disqus’ route !!
Requiring an account to write/discuss is gonna be a hard sell. I dunno if you’d end up losing certain readers as a result, but I wouldn’t bet on it either. OTOH if push comes to shove…
Have to agree. The more stones you place in the road, the harder it is to travel.
This is a simple policy and will be effective for the future.
I for one support this & feel it should have been done earlier – there are way too many trolls coming here & wasting everyone’s time. So Andrei is doing the right thing, & it is his site, so he can do what he wants. If people don’t like it – then go create your own site & start a free non-rules non-regulated commentary section.
Funny (but true) story for the paranoid:
My wife and I were driving in a foreign country recently. We are fluent in the local language, so when Google Maps wildly mispronounced a major street name (resulting in a silly innuendo), we had a huge belly laugh and started replying with mocking and rude comments every time Google said it. (Helps to reduce the stress of world class traffic jams.)
After some days of this, Google suddenly changed the pronunciation. BTW, the new pronunciation was still wrong but not nearly so funny. After a few more days, Google began giving very bad directions – insanely longer routes, claimed road closures where there were none, etc. I finally had to switch to a different GPS.
Was this coincidence? A disgruntled Google employee? An “always listening” AI system?
Hard to say, but there is no doubt that surveillance is ramping up dramatically. 5G is part of this as the high bandwidth and required high density of antennas mean that anyone identified is easy to find.
I prefer anonymity, using VPNs etc., and will only post anonymously. Not sure if it is sufficient, but it is worth the effort for many of us. That said, I respect whatever decision is reached by those who do the work here.
Of course site owners have a right to do whatever they want and to filter comments and commenters and opinions and whatever. However, when it’s overdone, what happens is that variety of viewpoints disappears and you find yourself preaching to the choir. As for myself personally, I like discussions to be multi-polar, with all sorts of viewpoints represented and allowed to compete on the basis of logic. The truth will always win in a fair fight. So that’s the filter that’s the most important, fairness, politeness, and tolerance, not only allowing but even encouraging other viewpoints to give it their best shot. And may the best logic win. Even if it’s nothing like my own viewpoint. Like someone once put it, “let the daisies grow”.
Hypnosis implies a form of mental imbecility. I have another theory. The EU is a project created by elites, the goal of that project is to keep the nations of Europe down, to subjugate and control. These people also hate Russia, at least a Russia which is not subjugated and controlled. The policies of the EU, causing problems in the European countries allows them to legitimize and impose their big plans with the nations of the EU even faster. That these policies and plans on themselves are an irresponsible risque taking doesn’t matter, they are taking big risks as they are blinded by the lust for power. Mental imbecility which is hypnosis is another thing than blind urge for power.
If I am not right about this, all expertise which exist in the higher echelons of Europe, of people who have knowledge about all what is listed in this article, would be somehow debilitated by a sudden hypnotic state, the hypnosis would sort of wipe out all expertise and rationality. Mind you that many extremely irresponsible ‘hypnotic’ projects are already running over a very long time (mass immigration, human caused climate change scam, etc).
Choose your pick, ‘hypnotized elites’ or lust for power taking huge risks The latter has happened before in history, causing huge economic problems and also leading to great suffering and the death of millions. In these cases the disastrous policies were bluntly imposed and caused by tyrannical individual dictators who took control explicitly, we now have a club of dictators who have been more or less legitimized. Great step forward (Mao), great reset, build back better?
Requiring a small donation is a good way to defeat bots and trolls. You could accept them in BTC or XMR if privacy was a concern. It’s not the amount of money that matters, it’s the hassle involved for a bot or troll to make the donation that is the hurdle. It could be a $1.
You could even require it and have a moderator override for someone who is unable for some reason.
this sign up is not really a way to stop trolls or bot. trolls will troll with a valid email id and they don’t mind giving it up.
here’s the rub:
– anything collected will be stored
– anything stored will be analyzed
– anything analyzed will be interpreted
– anything stored can be stolen or taken or subpeona’d
so, email, validation, password are fine if you want to limit audience, even though many may not do it on principle alone. this is your classic slippery slope case… unlike ecommerce websites, thoughts are put out here and people in the know will take precautions…
i suggest this to defeat trolls:
1. solving a puzzle
2. solving equation
3. clicking which frog is up in a 4×4 matrix of frogs
4. captcha like things
i hope you implement something like above than email/password/login
Ouch!
That will lock out “silly” people like me.
Not that I have low IQ, I just have, for different reason, left “puzzle solving” behind, and use my brain for other things.
I am not going to start up the puzzle-solving part of the brain again…..
So, I for one, will vote against your proposal.
Is it going to be safe to continue commenting popularly on general social issues…or will it become genuinely risky expressing critical opinion on government policies and activities and on our leaders along the way?
If that is what is developing I will simply stop commenting, operating accounts on the net that exposes one to any dangers such activity may expose one to.
It would be great if all those who operate such such activities on the net that require the full participation of zillions of ordinary people lead along with and in our collective behalf, claiming the general democracy that is the right of all, sacrosanct that no government anywhere would be able to compromise under any circumstances
Having Saker accounts for commenters is a good idea.