You don’t know what you’ve got
…until it’s gone. Wings Over Scotland is normally protected by a brilliant spam filter called Akismet, which blocks the constant flood of fake comments that assails every website on the internet. Akismet has filtered out 1,496,404 of these attempts to sell you counterfeit fashion, hardcore porn sites and attempts to steal your bank details since we started, in amongst the 120,297 real comments we’ve published in that time.
Last night it suffered a temporary outage, with the result that the four or five “pending” comments we usually wake up to in the morning – ones Akismet thinks are spam but isn’t 100% certain about, and so puts in a queue for us to look at manually – have been replaced today by 1,877 (and rising – an hour ago it was just over 1,000).
Here’s what this means for you.
1. If you posted a comment after about 1am this morning and it hasn’t appeared yet, it might not make it. We don’t have time to manually filter almost 2000 comments, so anything that Akismet doesn’t catch up with will get mass-deleted.
2. If you post a comment this morning that finds itself in the moderation queue for any reason, it might suffer the same fate. So be EXTRA-careful about:
– comments with multiple links in them
– comments with huge quotes from other websites
– comments with “signatures”. If you always put “Saor Alba” or “Alba gu brath” or “VOTE YES” or any such things at the end of your posts, those are automatically added to the mod queue so we can edit the sig out before they appear.
(Because folk don’t want to be bombarded with slogans all day, especially for things they almost certainly agree with already. Stop doing that, people. And while we’re here, stop signing your flipping name at the end as well. We KNOW it’s you, the comment’s ALREADY GOT YOUR NAME ON IT.)
– anything else that breaches our comment rules.
Otherwise, normal service should hopefully be resumed later this morning. Apologies.
Fantastic week for all concerned with the struggle makers-instate Scotland as an independent nation.
Any comment or figures Stu, on your twitter comment that WOS broke two records in the same day. Views and resultant posts must have shot up after the WP launch on Tuesday.
You are doing a brilliant job, I do not know how you can keep up with the increased traffic.
Keep on keeping on.
Any estimate as to when the filter is back on ?
“Any estimate as to when the filter is back on ?”
The number of comments in the queue has stopped rising and is now dropping very slowly as Akismet gets through the backlog, so hopefully it won’t be too long.
Well things happen, we will suffer it Stu. The site needs to work well.
“Any comment or figures Stu, on your twitter comment that WOS broke two records in the same day.”
Yesterday smashed the previous all-time one-day pageviews record (only set on Tuesday) by a whopping 23%, with a total of 116,762 views in 24 hours. Alert readers will deduce that that’s the first time we’ve broken 100,000.
Ah, that would account for my comment on the other thread awaiting ‘moderation.’
Just have to comment on how happy I was that Nicola gubbed Carmichael last night. A big cry baby who could answer nothing! Keep it up BT !
Will we have SPam Filters in an Independent Scotland?
Another missing answer in the White Paper!
Wow! You must be thrilled/exhausted.
2.5% of potential voters in Scotland viewed your site in one day.
If you expand the idea that once decided as yes you do not go back to no, the majority of these visitors will keep on visiting and numbers of readers/contributors will now surge exponentially.
One day soon, 10% of potential voters will visit daily to equip themselves with the info they need to convince undecided voters and to debunk MSM misinformation.
That is one helluva lot of ambassadors for the argument for an Independent Scotland.
The virus is now an epidemic.
Another good reason for voting YES.
link to dailymail.co.uk
Nicola could not have done any better, even if she used a wrecking ball! Demolition job.
I watched the BBC debate.Would it have been possible to ask Ms Lamont any softer a question about her views on nuclear weapons on the Clyde? Pathetic from the BBC.It was so obvious.
Lanarkist
“The virus is now an epidemic.”
Quickly followed by a pandemic
Well done Stu and us.
I have recorded last night’s debate and tonight’s QT.
these can await my return from Iceland. Another Too Wee Place.
I noticed at about 1.30 am that the site seemed to be down…wonder if it was attacked?
Whoosh! 116,762 views. Terrific. Thank the good Lord for the online medium otherwise we’d never get the message out there the way we have. When you think back to the Yes/Yes referendum campaign, man that was easy compared to now, what with the MSM pretty much on side back then.
Still, as Homer maybe said, if a thing’s really hard to do, then the reward’s really great. Or something like that. Maybe. You know what I mean.
John king
Quickly followed by victory and a giant national party!
Well done that young man.
Will we have Spam Fritters in an Independent Scotland?
I never really liked Spam Fritters.
To Robert Kerr – Just back from Iceland. Great to see a country with a population less than Fife after going through a terrible financial and banking crisis but behaving like adults and running their country for the benefit of the people. It struck me as a situation impossible in the UK but far more possible in an independent Scotland. Enjoy the place and the friendly, confident people.
Good stuff, Rev, and more power to your elbow – your comments facility is inmmensely valuable. I’ve just had an entire comment deleted from NNS on the David Torrance article because it dared to mildly criticise the author.
So I know who I’ll NOT be crowdfunding.
Interesting wee article in the Scotsman today by Peter de Vink, chief executive of Edinburgh Financial General Holdings, arguing, as a Tory, that the No side runs the danger of being too late now to present a compelling positive case for remaining in the Union.
link to archive.is
Rev, somethings no working, am getting fed up haveing to keep typeing my name e mail addy,every time i go to the top of the page
Tonight’s QT is a rerun of Nicola Vs The Bruiser. i missed it last night and tonight I’ll be out for a couple of pints so I’ll have to catch up on iPlayer. He must be crapping himself to be going out for another doing – he’s having to miss the Downing Street’s patronising Scottish/St Andrews night, puir sowl.
The programme is from Falkirk and includes Big Mags C so should be an uncomfortable night for her with a good chance of some classic moments à la James Kelly. Others on the panel are Dame Goldie, Patrick Harvie and Eddi Reader so might be more balanced than usual and Dimbleby should be able to control it much better than last night’s disgrace at PQ.
SOS Body Language – Interesting use of the pen in the right hand which seemed at times to be like a dart or even a WMD aimed at NS. Was his left hand mainly in his trouser pocket?
I will check once the debate is posted online but I am sure during the toasting he replied to a question ‘I dont know, I won’t be here’.
Training day at 10.05
Join the club
O/T, piece from Deutsche Bank about why a Sterling Zone is in Scotland’s interests, and, if the UK really didn’t want to play, why we should just use use the Pound anyway. Some of it’s a bit technical (for me at least) but always interesting to get a foreign view on our referendum issues.
link to archive.is
At the radical independence conference someone (possibly someone from here – didn’t think to ask) had piles of the Aye Right as a nice A5 leaflet, and others in my Yes branch have sourced them from elsewhere too. So a lot of them must be hitting the streets now. After the white paper release we were out leafleting the train stations and gave out over a thousand just in a couple of hours, just our branch.
So hello and welcome to anyone who’s new here
Does anyone think that Lamont was actually coached beforehand
I’m going by the profusion of ‘Blair’ hand gestures to emphasise points
Lamont always appears coached. I’m convinced she’s had rather a lot of media training to try to turn her into a silk purse, but it must be a hard slog. And of course she would have had special coaching before something like last night.
A friend was just saying yesterday that they really noticed how the Twa Fishes were not using Westminster Politician hand Gestures, and how refreshing it was to see. So well spotted Edward on JL using them more.
Well done to all at Wings.
I have been actively encouraging all doubters to visit the site for the unparallelled coverage of the Independence debate and the questions that are never answered by the MSM.
Having been an active participant on the Hootsman for several years, always with the same’ish user name, its always handy to have a source of undeniable facts available to educate the irrational No Better greetin faced whiners…
More power to your keyboard.
Congratulations on breaking more page view records Rev.
Do you not feel guilty that people like me have stopped buying the Scotsman and Herald and rely on you and others for our news now?
Does the dog collar in you not feel any remorse?
LOL
That GrahamB says he’s going out for a couple of pints tonight got me wondering if we’ll be allowed to keep old imperial measures if we vote for independence.
I assume if we can’t keep the pound for our currency, we can’t keep pints for our beer or miles for our road signs. Will our GPS still work based as it is on the Greenwich meridian?
Well it is nice to post in a comments section that isn’t full of adverts for dodgy medications or dangerous scam links that send you blundering into malware.
Jake says
“Will our GPS still work based as it is on the Greenwich meridian?”
Will our clocks go backwards, will the water drain down the plughole counter clockwise? WE NEED ANSWERS!
Jake, We need to change to Greenland time ,anything after Independence that we dispose of flows south does that help
JO LO , kept glanceing to her left, she was nt looking at J Swinney, so I think she was reading of a Idiot board of cam
Hi Rev Stuart
just a few words to say thank you for the effort you put in over the last few days to keep us all in the picture. It has been a very busy spell with the white paper and the follow up material to the drivel pumped out by the usual suspects. Many, many, thanks for that and although I didn’t comment, I was following the debate avidly. Some very fine points made and thanks to all the “wingers”, new and old, for their lively contributions.
My flipping name is “Alastair Darling”.