Moderation problems, and a bit more on Craig Murray

At time of writing, there are almost 200 comments on the previous thread - in one sense that's a good thing, because it demonstrates how widely-read Scot Goes Pop is.  But yesterday was a nightmare day from a moderation point of view, because there were several dozen more comments that had to be deleted.  An anonymous commenter had falsely accused me on Thursday night of posting anonymously on the thread myself, and I warned him that if he kept making that accusation, he would no longer be welcome to post here.  Needless to say, he did keep making the accusation, so I started blanket-deleting his comments, which is the only way to "ban" someone on the Blogger platform.  He then tried to take advantage of the fact that it is difficult to distinguish between different anonymous commenters, and started posing as an innocent participant who was having comments deleted for no other reason than that they were supportive of Craig Murray - which makes no sense, because if you read through the thread, there are as many comments that are supportive of Craig (indeed perhaps slightly more) than there are critical of him.

I made abundantly clear in the previous blogpost that I was not having a go at Craig, and personally I have no problem whatsoever with him standing as a Workers Party of Britain candidate in England.  The point I was making wasn't really about Craig at all, it was about the fact that Alba are clearly prepared to interpret their rules generously in his case, and my hope that "the little guy" will in future benefit from similar flexibility and tolerance in equivalent situations.  As I said, my fear is that Alba is becoming a bit too authoritarian, and it's not hard to think of instances where lesser-known members have had the book thrown at them for far, far less than what Craig has done.  The solution to that is not to throw the book at Craig, it's to be consistent and chill out a bit when dealing with rank-and-file members.  

Based on what I've seen happen in the past, my strong suspicion is that if anyone who is not a Craig Murray or a similarly prominent figure had announced an intention to stand for the Workers Party, they would have been deemed to have "publicly resigned" from Alba - in other words they would have been to all intents and purposes banned from the party, and wouldn't have been allowed to rejoin without advance permission from the NEC.  The reason for that is the Workers Party registration with the Electoral Commission, which shows it as being active in Scotland and therefore an opponent of Alba.  Interestingly, Craig implied in a couple of comments on the previous thread that he is using his candidacy as leverage with George Galloway to try to get assurances from him that the Workers Party will not stand in Scotland and will no longer campaign against independence.  But, again, I'm not sure Alba would have cut that sort of slack with a less prominent person - there would just have been a knee-jerk ruling that the rules had been broken and that would have been that.

In a nutshell, I think the blind eye that has been turned to Craig's decision is a good thing and should be the template for the treatment of rank-and-file Alba members in future.  Nobody joins a political party, particularly a fledgling small party, to be subject to military-style discipline.  Alba will not thrive as a Leninist sect that keeps its members in constant terror of stepping out of line. It needs to be an open, welcoming party that gives its members room to breathe and that is enjoyable to be part of.

But so convinced was our anonymous troll chum that I was waging some sort of anti-Murray campaign that he re-posted exactly the same comment fifteen or twenty times last night.  He seemed to be refreshing the page every two minutes to see if I had deleted it, and as soon as I did, he re-posted it yet again.  To give myself a break, I temporarily changed the settings to only allow comments from people signed in to a Google account.  Needless to say the troll was not brave enough to put a name to his comment, and he stopped for a while.  But as soon as I changed the settings back this morning, he started all over again.

Believe it or not, I do have better things to do with my Easter weekend than to moderate blog comments every few minutes.  I very much want to keep pre-moderation switched off, but that's going to require a bit of responsibility from the people leaving comments.