I use Radio Userland as a news aggregator, but have never really investigated its feasibility as a weblog tool. I was very surprised to see how easily Scott Rosenberg’s Salon.Com blog has been hijacked by spammers thanks to the extremely limited nature of Radio Userland’s Comments feature,
Speaking of comments, those of you who pay attention to the comments on this blog will have noticed a marked increase in the strange practice of spam-posting comments — reposting the same verbiage multiple times. (Sometimes this happens as a result of slow response time from the server, but those cases usually lead to 2, 3 or 4 reposts, not ten and 20.) This is a waste of bandwidth and, more important, a waste of this blog’s readers’ time. So cut it out. If necessary I’ll just turn off comments here, but I’d rather not do that. I’ve got no problem with endless vocal disagreement with me. There’s been lots of good, smart dialogue in there. But I have no patience for juvenile spam tactics.
And yes, I know that Radio UserLand’s comments feature is pretty rudimentary — it should offer the ability to delete posts, ban posters and otherwise moderate those comments boards. I’m sorry it’s not better. Since we don’t develop the software here at Salon, I can’t take this on myself, but will continue to communicate this kind of feedback to the UserLand team.
I disagree with Rosenberg about pretty much everything, but now it’s pointless to even post such disagreements on his comments section because some idiot goes in and posts hundreds of kilobytes worth of junk text precisely to sabotage his comments section.
Userland announced the comments feature for Radio back in February of 2002, so it’s a bit surprising they haven’t added even basic features like the ability to delete a post. Maybe someone could put together a checklist for Userland on how to get there, because it’s got to be embarassing to have such a prominent user of their software have these sorts of problems.